ERIK SCHMIDT – RAYS AROUND YOU

Posted on 2016-11-07

A dense mesh of color dominates the latest paintings by Erik Schmidt . Small areas of pigment and moments of looming color are put together like a jigsaw puzzle with strong lines in between – and then: white. Many of the paintings, which were inspired by the time Schmidt spent in Japan in 2015, shows what one sees if he were to gaze upwards at an intersection: an impenetrable, unattractive thicket of the utility lines of a megalopolis.
Schmidt pursues these nodes in increasingly strong abstraction. The cables, the colorful building facades, the gaudy advertisements are certainly recognizable, yet dissolve the more one delves into the image, gradually becoming pure painting. Erik Schmidt makes his interest in structure, geometry, and not least, color as material, almost physically palpable. His paintings are equally always reflections about painting itself – about color, surface and, influenced by his recent engagement with the tradition of Japanese art– line. Schmidt’s current works are more graphic than his paintings to date: the thick paint sometimes floats, scattered above white surfaces, leaving the ground and sometimes even the field completely. There is no tradition of painting as we know it in Japan.

Opposite – Transition of maximum, 2016

Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2017

carlier | gebauer
Markgrafenstraße 67
D-10969 Berlin
Germany

www.carliergebauer.com

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ADRIA ARCH AND ANNE KRINSKY – VIS-À-VIS

Posted on 2016-11-07

Vis-à-Vis: Adria Arch and Anne Krinsky, an exhibition of paintings inspired by traditional Indian folk arts. In 2014, Adria Arch and Anne Krinsky spent a fruitful, sensory-rich month as Artists-in-Residence at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi.

“The two friends lived at the Foundation, engaged with other artists and craftspeople, experienced the visual stimuli of neighboring cities and learned about traditional folk arts of India. They visited markets and museums, met with artisans at paper factories and textile workshops and sought out creative connections between their new environs and their art-making practices…

For Arch, serendipitous exposure to a Foundation exhibition of Hindu shadow-puppets paved the way for a conceptual breakthrough. Lured by the lavishly painted, multi-jointed, two-dimensional puppets of gods and goddesses on view, Arch loved the way that their flat silhouettes doubled as spectacular studies in shape, form, and movement. Their outlines reminded Arch of her own recent experiments with poured-paint pieces… She eagerly set to work … spilling paint on sheets of mylar – a material that in many ways mimicked the translucency of the puppet parchment. Arch waited for the spills to dry, cut out the abstract, fluid forms, glued them to printmaking paper, and then painted additional elements in fulfillment of fanciful, imagined narratives.

For Krinsky, an introduction to Phulkari embroidered textiles from the Punjab served as a jumping off point for a novel paint-on-paper exploration of texture and geometry. Her Sanskriti-inspired series dovetails beautifully with a longtime interest in mining archives and primary source materials – in this case traditional fabrics from the Delhi Craft Museum – to push her practice… In her Phulkari series, Krinsky’s robust reds, rusts, mustards and marigolds – taken directly from the textiles themselves – appear stained, washed, weathered and with tactile, stucco-like qualities thanks to the use of acrylic molding pastes and pumice gels on Khadi papers and on panels.

Opposite – Adria Arch, Turn, 2014

Exhibition runs through to December 4th, 2016

ARTHOUSE1
45 Grange Road
London
SE1 3BH

www.arthouse1.co.uk

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