SPENCER FINCH

Posted on 2013-12-23

The exhibition follows his ongoing exploration into the most elusive of subjects: Color and its perception, or what Cezanne is said to have described as “the place where our brain and the universe meet.” On view are drawings, collages, light installations and a window work using the incoming natural light. Each of the works reveals a different mode of analysis and approach to its subject, giving the exhibition a feel akin to that of an experimental laboratory.

Color Test (624), 2013 for instance, consists of a light box confronting the viewer with an overwhelming abundance of colors. In a process comparable to the mixing of pigments on a painter’s palette, Finch filters the “neutral” white emanating from the light box with two layers of translucent film imprinted with an irregular checkerboard pattern in different hues. The result, a total of 624 different individual color variations, calls into question the limitations of visual perception and differentiation. Indeed, it is unclear how many colors the human eye can discriminate. The Optical Society of America estimates between 7.5–10 million, while other scientists maintain that effectively no more than 180 hues can be distinguished.
The diptych Study for Disappearance, 2013 is related to phenomenological questions of color perception. The work records the changes in the perception of our surroundings when faced with the absence of light. In this case, the artist studied the appearance of colors on nearly 100 different objects in his Brooklyn studio during daylight, matching their tones in watercolor applied on paper. The resulting drawing is paired with a record of the identical objects, this time observed at dusk as the colors shift to grayscale.

Exhibition runs through to January 11th, 2014

Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse 34
DE-10969 Berlin
Germany

www.nordenhake.com

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ARMEN ELOYAN

Posted on 2013-12-23

The instinctive approach Eloyan applies to his painting draws on his emotional bond to an array of collective experiences, related to childhood and youth. The artist’s attitude of painting even refers to the automatic painting of the New York school (Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning). Most of the titles here such as ‘Black dog’ or ‘Dizzy girl’ seem to be fairly unmistakeable, when iconic figures as Mickey Mouse, dogs and dinosaurs reappear in his work.
Eloyan frequently uses oil paint as a sculptural material, applying it to his canvases layer by layer, resulting in virtually three-dimensional objects. The physicality of the paint and the emphasis on the fact that they are manually done seem to be the key to understanding them.

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2014

Tim Van Laere Gallery
Verlatstraat 23-25
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

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AXEL KASSEBÖHMER – 100 X WALCHENSEE

Posted on 2013-12-23

Since the advent of modernism, the landscape, once among the most important genres of painting, has been relegated to an art-historical twilight zone. The genre last enjoyed prominence with the painters of Impressionism, among them Lovis Corinth. Corinth’s most famous landscape paintings come from the years when he spent his summers in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, along the shores of the lake known as the Walchensee. Axel Kasseböhmer takes up this moment in art history in a series of one hundred small-format oil paintings based on motifs featuring the lake, some created near the summerhouse of Lovis Corinth, shown as a group in an exhibition entitled 100 x Walchensee. Like many landscape painters before him, Kasseböhmer pursued a private project with these pictures, creating the series after a long convalescence. The paintings not only explore the status of the landscape in contemporary art, but also investigate what, precisely, painting itself can achieve today.

Kasseböhmer’s radical approach to painting is the result of a long development as an artist. The painter earned a reputation at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties for his enigmatic paintings that called to mind segments of well-known works from art history. Following this body of work, Kasseböhmer created a series of pictures that used as their starting point large-format landscape photographs, which he over painted until the underlying photograph disappeared. Afterwards he developed various series’, focusing on still lifes, trees and seascapes, taking up diverting styles to conduct a systematic investigation into the possibilities of painting. What connects all these series’ is a heightened awareness of loss. In his œuvre, Kasseböhmer undertakes the almost impossible endeavor of ushering painterly values into today’s world.

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2014

Sprüth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 18
D-10178 Berlin

www.spruethmagers.com

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