There is something innocent and light in the image of a paper fly like on this invitation .
Just think about a kid playing with it. – What is more suitable for a playful exhibition with
artworks, which are making use of this media in all kind of way? Isn’t paper the basic medium
of making art? There are surely very few artists who never used it in their creative process at
a certain point.
But nevertheless – paper as a medium is not as easy as it seems: Its maybe 2200 year old
history might about to be over. It is definitely in its last chapter. In the old China paper was
something holy and the making of it a carefully protected secret. The Arabs brought it to the
west and with Gutenberg’s letter press machine it got its breakthrough: money, books,
documents, pamphlets, pictures, photos, photocopies. It became the communication media
from the highest to the lowest culture the next 500 years.
Now we are in the middle of a new revolution of communication: More and more information
in our culture becomes digital. The computer displaces paper, which means that a material
information carrier is displaced by a virtual one. We can only guess where it leads. Fact is:
credit cards displace money, kids are using their notebooks instead of exercise books and
David Hockney just demonstrated how great it is to make drawings on his iphone.
So what does paper mean for artists today? There is surely not one answer. But there are
plenty to find in the show at 55 artists from 13 nations with 4 to 12 works each will show
how lively this media still is and not leave much free space on the wall.
The following artists participate:
Tag: 2010
OWL STRETCHING TIME
GAVIN NOLAN @ CHARLIE SMITH
André Butzer
André Butzer’s second New York show at Metro Pictures “Nicht fürchten! Don´t be scared!” features a group of new, closely related works that focus on the “formal event” of painting. By emphasizing shapes and fields of color, these works possess a less linear take on the usual motifs in his work—colorful hybrids of abstraction and cartoon figuration featuring a family of characters inspired by art history, comics, politics and animation. Both sinister and amusing, these elegant compositions balance large, vaguely recognizable biomorphic forms within chaotic, multicolored backgrounds or heavily textured monochromatic fields.
“Blue Smurf” presents the most identifiable image in the exhibition with the cartoon character embedded in a complex field of thick paint—the Smurf’s wry smile acknowledges his victory over abstraction. In the reductive “Entombment of Winnie the Pooh” a Pooh-yellow blob is taken to his grave in the night; a sacrificial pop martyr intended to unite art history. “Favorite Painting of Paul Cezanne” and “Aladdin and the Magic Oil Lamp” balance Butzer’s use of maximal, colorful abstraction and a newfound spatiality to celebrate the Post-Impressionist master and to “have something truly colorful and tender like a big Disney movie”, respectively.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a progression of three paintings by the same name. In the first, a thickly painted flesh colored kite shape (a fish? a piece of meat?) emerges from a web of bright, gestural painting. The second follows the same format with an enormous black spider shape prominently taking over the canvas. Finally, in the third, the black color has power over the whole canvas, over-painting the thick shapes and colors in evidence underneath.
André Butzer was born in 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany and lives and works in Rangsdorf. He has exhibited widely in galleries in Europe, Japan and the United States. A survey show (with catalogue) of his work was held at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 2009.
Tomas Saraceno ///
Copenhagen Graffiti //
Joseph Marioni //
Slawomir Elsner
Cordy Ryman
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with New York artist Cordy Ryman.
With accessible materials like Velcro, manufactured woods, enamels and various other found objects, Ryman constructs simple and elegant forms that conflate the aesthetics of Minimalism and Post Painterly Abstraction. Rough and casual, Ryman’s sculptures treat the reductive movements that form the apex of Modern Art as pliable components employed toward a yet unfinished project. Without being overwrought or playing to the lowest common denominator, they represent a strategy for how art can leave behind the limiting principles of our last century and engage formalism for today.
Cordy Ryman’s (b. 1971, New York City) solo exhibitions include Taché-Levy Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), DCKT Contemporary (New York, NY), Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York, NY), Traver Gallery (Seattle, WA) and Stalke Up North (Gilleleje, Denmark). Group exhibitions include Aberrant Abstraction, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS), One More, Esbjerg Museum of Modern Art (Esbjerg, Denmark), Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York, NY) and Greater New York 2005 at P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center (Long Island City, NY).
THINGS THAT MATTER A LOT
It’s not only a matter of what the matter is.
It’s a matter of what is most important. (Translated from Danish)
This is how you could translate Things That Matter A Lot at Galleri Christoffer Egelund, where the artist Trine Boesen, in cooperation with the gallery, has invited the artists Benny Dröscher, John Kørner, Nina Saunders and Theis Wendt to exhibit, under the above-mentioned title.
What matters? Do all things matter equally? We are not always able to see what matters. Art matters, and art is about something that matters. Art works by showing us what we hadn’t expected to see. Ghosts, for instance. Or chaos and revolt in our everyday lives. When art matters, we are genuinely surprised. It’s compact. Or it’s airy, like a vision when we’re blinded.
This is what these five artists work with – and now you can see the result at Galleri Christoffer Egelund. The well-known and well-regulated has gone astray. When the artists show landscapes, cities, human beings or furniture, these do not look the way we’re used to. The smooth illusion of reality has vanished. The title refers to artists whose works make a contribution to the social debate and/or are surrealistic reflections of the surrounding world. Expect equal shares of chaos and artfulness with an edge.
Trine Boesen says:
“We have invited Dröscher, Kørner, Saunders and Wendt because between them they generate a good feeling of both rapture and challenge. They work with things that matter … things that matter a lot. The title is also a comment on the current time of crisis. Art is important, not just money. It’s food for the soul. The artists of the exhibition cover a wide range, so their point of departure, materials and methods, are manifold, and the contributions by the individual artists are mutually reinforcing.
Trine Boesen has painted an entire wall and hung paintings of ghosts on it against a background with a big, black star and bubbles that rise like in sparkling water. Benny Dröscher shows dream-like pictures and intricate sculptures, amongst these a floating suspended sculpture, which may include haloes, glitter, flying objects and a spruce. The artist reaches far. John Kørner, who is known for mixing landscape, pure fantasy and magic realism, shows a great painting from the series of dead soldiers. The title of the painting is Dan. Expect the best and you won’t get disappointed. Nina Saunders creates pure-style white upholstery and impresses us this time with four unheimliche furniture sculptures that have swallowed stuffed animals. Theis Wendt, who is also known for his spatial installations, excels in large-format paper works in a class by themselves. Feel free to study the details.