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Betty Cuningham Gallery, New
York |
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Norbert Prangenberg, Paintings
April 1 - May 22, 2010
Betty Cuningham Gallery is
pleased to announce an exhibition of the paintings of
Norbert Prangenberg. This will be the
artist's first exhibition at the gallery and is presented in
collaboration with Bernd Schellhorn of Berlin,
Germany.
Included in the exhibition will be a
selection of approximately 30 recent paintings. Although
primarily known as a sculptor, Prangenberg has always worked
in a variety of media; his sculptures, paintings, drawings,
and prints are recognized as equally significant. And
one media is not exclusive of the other; for example his
ceramics very much influence the tactile way in which he
applies his paint. Throughout all of his work, his
fundamental relationship between sight and touch, eye and
hand, is evident.
The paintings in this exhibition are all
small, ranging from 10 x 8 inches to approximately 27 x 20
inches. Prangenberg paints on a variety of surfaces:
cardboard, wood, metal, and occasionally canvas, often
allowing a portion of the foundation or ground to peak through
the paint. The artist uses brushstrokes, finger marks,
varying densities of paint and intensities of color resulting
in a vibrant tactile surface.
And to anchor the thickly
impastoed surface, Prangenberg introduces either a simple,
non-narrative geometric form, or a picture within a picture, a
small area of intense color that contrasts to the larger
painting.
Each painting can be categorized into one
of five genres: Faces (in which the image of a face appears
from the paint), Robinson (referring to castaway Robinson
Crusoe), Bilder (images of ideas, e.g. a painting of "night"
or "three huts"), Abstrakt (an abstract painting), or Tengu
(supernatural creatures in Japanese folklore). The
artist disregards theory and does not favor a particular genre
while he paints, but the theatricality of his process and
exploration of the interaction of hand, eye, and material
allows the characteristics to emerge that align each resulting
painting with its genre.
Prangenberg has an extensive exhibition
history in Europe and the UK; notably and most recently he had
two solo shows: Norbert Prangenberg: Zeichnungen
1978-2004, in 2005 at the Staatliche Kunstalle,
Karlsrude, Germany and Norbert Prangenberg: Retrospektive
der Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Gouachen 1978-2004, at the
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum, Krefeld, Germany in 2004. In the
United States he exhibited at Hirschl & Adler Modern in
1986.
Norbert Prangenberg was
born in Rommerskirchen-Nettesheim, Germany. He undertook
an apprenticeship working as a gold and silversmith with C.
Kessler in Cologne and since 1993 he has held a professorship
at the Art Academy in Munich. The artist lives and works
in Niederarnbach and Munich, Germany.
A catalogue with an essay by Walter
Grasskamp will accompany the exhibition. It includes 42
color images and is published by Kerber Verlag,
Bielefeld/Leipzig.
Image:
Norbert Prangenberg
ABSTRAKT (16.12.09), 2009
Oil on
wood
23 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches
60 x 50 cm
Courtesy of
Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West
25 Street
New York, NY 10001
T: +1 212.242.2772
E:
info@bettycuninghamgallery.com
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Art: Concept, Paris |
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Nathan HYLDEN
Once I Get Started
March 20th - April 30th 2010
The opening of Art:
Concept 's new space will be marked by a solo
exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Nathan
Hylden.
Once I Get Started is part of a
progression of exhibitions titled Again And As If To
Begin, Just Something Else, Starting To An
End, Still Now Again, and Done And. By
way of these titles the artist points at aspects of a painting
practice based upon auto-reference, an investigation of the
terms of a painting's finality, and the personal temporal
experience of making and exhibiting work. As the title
indicates, Hylden thinks of painting in temporal terms, both
as a suspended representation of a process and as continuous
projection of visual affect. Although inscribed within a
certain time or even when the finality of the work seems to be
postponed, the production of individual pieces involves a
looping effect comprising reaction and feedback.
Hylden's work is the result of a process
that often generates its own logic of production. The painting
tools are either exposed or the traces of their use left
visible. The artist considers the production as an entity
inseparable from the final result, and his artistic practice
is as much centered on the exhibition as medium (in the way
space is occupied) as on the expanded concept of painting
itself.
The exhibition consists of a new series of
works made up of alternating layers of metallic washes of
paint, white spray paint, and a screen-printed image. When
spraying the white paint the works are stacked one on another
in a way so that every painting is implicated to the process
of making another. Through this process, a discrete work bears
the indexical mark, as negative shadow, of another in the
series. In each painting the order of operations is different
and thus the "ground" of the paintings is unfixed. Rather than
working on stretchers and canvases, like in his previous
abstract and geometric paintings, Hylden carries on with his
exploration of metal supports that now bear the image of the
previous canvas format. While Hylden often utilizes
mechanically structured or industrial processes, the hand-made
gestural qualities so often evoked by painting on canvas are
not entirely absent from this new series. They persist by
means of the process of representation, or rather by the means
where-by the image is produced.
Once I Get Started is an
exhibition that deals with the relation of an image to the
material form in which it is manifest. As a result of his
approach to this, Hylden's system becomes exponential,
expanding yet continuously folding back on itself. Always
proceeding from the same photograph of a blank canvas, which
has become the matrix of all his aluminium works, the artist
has produced several paintings whose surfaces are
progressively covered with large areas of paint applied with
spray-paint or brushes. From one work to the other, the layout
of these geometric and abstract patterns evolves following a
cumulative and enfolding logic. In some cases the all-over
layers of paint are intrusive yet underline the pre-existing
printed image, while in others the printed image appears to
follow the painted forms, thus seeming to invert or unsettle
the traditional causal effects of painting.
When choosing to represent a blank, unused,
canvas, Hylden investigates the depictive and imaginative
potential suggested by such an object. As suggested by Gilles
Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation, the blank canvas is not so
much empty, as it is full of every painting ever made, and
Hylden's idea is therefore to merge into this twofold
condition that allows him to endlessly re-position himself
around this unused, full yet empty, canvas.
Expanding on ideas set forth in his
previous exhibitions for Once I Get Started Nathan Hylden
continues to question the format and conventions of painting
enfolded on its own terms.
Caroline
Soyez-Petithomme
Translation: Frieda Schumann
Image:
Nathan HYLDEN
Untitled,
2010
acrylic on aluminum, 77.5 x 57 in
Courtesy Art:
Concept, Paris, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
Art: Concept
13 rue des
Arquebusiers
F - 75003 Paris
France
T: +33 1 53 60 90 30
E:
info@galerieartconcept.com
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LOCUSLUX Gallery, Brussels |
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Jaap de Vries
03 April 3 - 15 May 2010
LOCUSLUX Gallery
presents a new selection of works on paper and aluminium by
Jaap de Vries.
In contemporary art there are no longer any
limits on the material the artist uses to create his world.
Therein Jaap de Vries (b.1959) carves-out his particular
route, and from the start he has chosen unusual surfaces for
his paintings. He is a thoroughbred painter, but canvas has
never been his material. For a while he painted on paper that
he then cut into strips and used to fabricate an image.
Layered into form, layered into meaning. After that it was
watercolour, a traditional medium, which made it possible for
him to accelerate the image and optimise the expressive power
of the paint. Because what Jaap de Vries thinks and intends to
do, beyond his own rationale, is to give the material its own
chance. In unexpected twists, in coincidences, even in
mistakes. A spot of colour can at once appear and cause a
stir, just because it is there, without having been conceived.
Sometimes beauty is something one receives as a gift.
For several years now, de Vries has been
painting on offset printing plates, a totally unconventional
painted image carrier but an excellent way for him to
intensify that which began with watercolour on saturated
paper. Allowing for new possibilities, those of reflection,
for example. Offset plate, itself mirror-smooth, is an ideal
surface for his swift, thin and transparent painting
technique, which ultimately gives form to what his role as an
artist has always comprised, activating in the viewer moral
reflection, as uncomfortable as it is inescapable. His work
presents to us a mirror of emptiness and threat, a ladened
world that despite its beauty is hostile.
With Jaap de Vries there is a unity of form
and content. Medium (painting), conveyor and message are
united in the painted image that is itself immaterial. As per
Magritte's La Clef de Champs, painted in 1936,
showing a room with a window looking out onto a landscape. But
the window is broken and in the shards that have fallen onto
the floor we see fragments of the landscape, like mirrors that
have retained the image. As in Jaap de Vries's paintings, the
mirror and the image are allied. His way of working is a
paradox. He takes the mirror of the raw plate away in order to
enable more mirroring. The paint transforms the literalness of
the reflecting offset plate into a substantive message that
incites us to reflect.
de Vries's painting of a concrete clad
interior space, 'In search of the most explicit ', is
bare and inhospitable, and atrociously memorable. The absence
of humans here hurts. 'Broken Glass ' reveals a
window containing bullet holes in which we see the affected
reflections of officers in combat gear, grim symbols of power.
And like the girl in 'Violet ', of whom we see no
more than the shape of the head, the eyes, the dried paint.
Deeper than the skin of paint we do not come, the internal
remains closed and we remain outsiders. We see someone who is
not there. What we are left with is the immateriality of the
image, the mirror of our self. Dark matter.
Frits de Coninck, Art Critic
March,
2010
Jaap de Vries presented works in a solo
at LOCUSLUX Gallery in October 2008. A selection of his works
will be shown during Art Amsterdam 2010. In July of this year,
20 Hoxton Square Gallery will present works by Jaap de Vries
in a solo exhibition.
Image:
Jaap de Vries
The
Silence, 2010
73cm x 103cm
watercolor on
aluminium
Courtesy of LOCUSLUX Gallery Brusels
LOCUSLUX Gallery
Oude Graanmarkt 57
1000 Brussels
Belgium
T: +32 (0) 2 512 13 11
E:
info@locuslux.com
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Galerie Nelson - Freeman,
Paris |
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Silvia Bächli
10 April - 21 May 2010
The Galerie Nelson-Freeman
is pleased to present Silvia Bächli's s
fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Silvia Bächli was born in Switzerland
in 1956. Her life is shared between Paris and Basel, where she
has spent the past 30 years or so exploring the boundaries of
the art of drawing. This discipline more than any other, due
to its flexibility and immediacy allows her to express with
great intensity the fleeting moments of life. Using the body
and its movements as a starting point, Silvia Bächli's work
spreads into everything that can be considered part of the
realm of feeling. In this way she presents a reality made up
of fragments and impressions. She takes no interest in
grandiloquence, but prefers to give greater importance to
details, small things, minutiae... "I try to sense those words
that we have on the tips of our tongues but we can never
precisely define." *
Bächli's oeuvre revolves around a number of
recurring themes and patterns: Straight or curved lines,
checkerboard patterns, text extracts, landscapes, fragments of
the human form. Her work tries neither to be figurative nor
abstract. "Crossed lines can become stars or perhaps the lines
on the palm of ones hand (...) It is quite possible that
something figurative springs to the mind of the spectator, but
there are too few concrete signs to say exactly what it is
with any certainty." *
Drawing may well be at the heart of her
work, however over the last few years photography has begun to
figure increasingly in her art. Her photographs are in general
wild landscapes and their composition and framing have much in
common with her drawn work.
The creative process leading to Bächli's
work is extremely meticulous and thought out. It takes place
over a number of stages. The first stage is one of creation:
the artist produces a large number of drawings, created using
a limited palette of colours and simple shapes. She works
mainly in gouache, in shades of monochrome grey. Not log ago,
colours began to appear in her work. Following stays in
Finland and Iceland, she exclusively uses colours that evoke
Nordic landscapes with achromatic range going from pale blue
to the colours of earth. During the following stage she makes
her selection among the drawings. "Drawing involves, trying
something new, doing research, finding things, playing with
them, remembering and inventing things. Then, there is a
second stage of selection, verification and elimination."*
Finally, it is time to put the drawings up for exhibition.
This part of the process is an integral part of her work. She
always takes into account the exhibition space and its
specificities. The smaller works are either hung individually
or in groups. The distance between the oeuvres is as important
as the drawings themselves, in the same way as punctuation in
poetry or pauses in music. Since 1996, she has also been
showing her work in "table-showcases". This method allows her
bring different works together; create families and
collections following reoccurring patterns and certain links.
"These sets are composed of multiple parts and resemble the
notation of Gregorian chants. This type of singing brings
together a number of different voices. There are moments when
all the voices are heard together, moments of fusion. There
are also pauses, voices en masse and echoes... this is how I
see the world: different layers which rub off on each other."
*
For this new exhibition, Silvia Bächli has
developed a series, which she began in 2006. This series
consists of large format drawings showing a succession of
parallel lines drawn in grey or black with a wide variety of
density. In order to make these drawings, the artist placed
herself in the centre of each sheet of paper on the floor and
made long brush strokes without breaking off or going over the
lines again. Thus the artist's whole body is engaged in the
drawing and its resistance and limits determine the
result.
As well as this series, the artist is
also exhibiting photographs taken in 2008 during a stay in
Iceland. Over a period of several months, at the same time as
she was preparing her drawings for the Venice Biennale, Bächli
took photographs of the snow-covered landscapes of
Seydisfjordur. According to Silvia Bächli, these enormous
snowy spaces are like white pages of absolute serenity. "The
long snowy winter places these images in front of my nose. All
I had to do was pick them up." *
The upper floor of the gallery welcomes
an installation with a completely different atmosphere: it is
made up of older drawings in smaller and medium sized formats
using different techniques. A large drawing composed of lines
is hung on the opposite wall as a counterpoint.
Last year, Sylvia Bächli represented
Switzerland at the Venice Biennale (The Swiss Pavillion,
Giardini, June - November, 2009). She exhibited the
installation das (to Inger Christensen), in homage to the late
Danish writer and made up of thirty-three drawings and
photographs as well as a series of "table-showcases".
Her
work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at
major institutions, notably in 2007 at the Pompidou Centre
(Paris), at the Serralves Museum (Porto) and at the MAMCO
(Geneva) in 2006.
* Extracts from an interview with Silvia
Bächli by AnaÎl Pigeat and J. Emil Sennewald in Roven N_3,
March 2010.
Image:
Silvia Bächli
Untitled,
2008
Gouache on paper, 80 x 60 cm
Courtesy of Galerie
Nelson - Freeman
Galerie Nelson - Freeman
59 rue
Quincampoix
FR - 75004 Paris
T: +33 (0) 1 42 71 74
56
E: info@galerienelsonfreeman.com
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re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
April 14-15 Photography, Film & Video
April 28-29 Sculpture & Installation
May 5-6 - Mixed / Multi Media
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