WALDEMAR ZIMBELMANN

Posted on 2012-06-11

Waldemar Zimbelmann´´s paintings shift between painting and drawing, while the characteristics of drawing are of fundamental nature to his work. Sometimes using personal or anonymous photographic images as a point of departure, the artist devises a subtle, sensitive visual language that creates its subjects in an overlap of figuration and abstraction. Zimbelmann´s paintings emerge from a process of overpainting, which is reflected in his themes as the passing of a situation.

At times only hinted at, in Waldemar Zimbelmann´s paintings the silhouettes of people, animals, houses or landscapes lead to a conflation of shape, body, time and space, from which his surreal narratives emerge fragmentarily. Individual or group portraits of persons carrying out a silent (inter-) action in his compositions preside as shining and fading figures, their bodies address a shift between location and rootedness.

The texture of the painting and the three-dimensional paint application is critical to Zimbelmann´s artistic process: Based on different layers of paint, which accrue in the process of overpainting, a superposition of color and color planes develops, from which the artist renders his visual motifs by uncovering parts of these layers. The linear elements, often sgraffito, are finely drawn, almost resembling woodcut hatching, and are juxtaposed with a vigorous, sometimes extensive coloring, which brings vibrancy into Zimbelmann´s compositions.

Opposite – Untitled, 2012

Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2012

Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe
Klauprechtstr. 22
D – 76137 Karlsruhe
Germany

www.meyer-riegger.de

  

MAIREAD O’HEOCHA

Posted on 2012-06-11

Mairead O’hEocha describes the phenomena of the garden centre as a simultaneously interior and exterior experience where a resultant distortion of the expected colour register occurs. Normal and usually underwhelming forms; pots, plants, ornamental bird feeders, sprinklers and water features, etc. reinstate themselves in visually unexpected ways. In an intriguing and understated manner, they begin to undermine optical-to-intellectual conventions; pulling the rug from under the psychological and emotional implications of lessons learnt from Newton, Goethe and Itten, respectively. If in the real world, the colour wheel impacts upon our comprehension of, and feelings about things, how then does the physical alteration of a poly-dome – an artificial sky, fully worthy of Garcia’s trippiest moments, re-tune the garden centre’s captive surrogates of the natural world, plants, animals, nature, growth, life? What then does this say to us (and about us) as we return and re-populate the greater world – signified here by our almost universal passion for our gardens and the pastime of gardening – with its hybrid mutants, hanging baskets, hi-glazed planters and ceramic frogs?

Exhibition runs through to July 14th, 2012

Mother’s Tankstation
41-43 Watling Street
Ushers Island
Dublin 8
Ireland

www.motherstankstation.com

  

WILL COTTON

Posted on 2012-06-04

Conjuring his signature land of plentiful sweets, for the touchstone of this group of new works the Artist depicts Katy Perry (Cotton served as Artistic Director for her 2010 California Gurls music video) as the reluctant queen of an imagined Utopia. In Crown, she stands before a palisade of pastel cakes, holding the headpiece as if wary of its obligations and consequences, realizing that a reign of opulence and profusion will inevitably conclude in decline and decay.

Cotton evokes the memory of a time before this awareness in Candy Forest, an idyllic landscape that merits bright color but is instead painted in the monochromatic palette of an old sepia photograph. Yet even in that distant past this Utopia harbored an underside – a truth underscored in the paintings Landfill and Trash Pile. Here, doughnuts, pastry, and tarts are nothing but layers in a garbage heap, their allure diminished in a realm of infinite riches.

Opposite – Crown, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 30th, 2012

Mary Boone Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY
10151

www.maryboonegallery.com

  

STEPHEN WILLATS – SURFING WITH THE ATTRACTOR

Posted on 2012-06-04

London-based artist Stephen Willats is a pioneer of conceptual art and has made work examining the function and meaning of art in society since the late 1950s. His first South London Gallery exhibition in 1998, entitled Changing Everything, brought together a body of work made in partnership with local residents over a two-year period. Aiming to create a cultural model of how art might relate to society, the work invited visitors to make their own contributions to it, shifting the way the art institution relates to the world around it.For his latest show, Surfing with the Attractor, Willats re-presents material from Changing Everything alongside a new installation featuring a huge ‘data stream’ spanning 15 metres and made in collaboration with 14 London-based artists. Comprising hundreds of carefully ordered images in various media, the data stream documents two contrasting streets of London: Rye Lane in Peckham and Regent Street in the West End.

Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2012

South London Gallery
65-67 Peckham Road
London
SE5 8UH1

www.southlondongallery.org

  

JASON MARTIN – INFINITIVE

Posted on 2012-06-04

In a daring new work, Martin has dramatically transcended the two-dimensional. On arriving at the gallery, the visitor is confronted by the monumental, matt black, cubed block, Behemoth, measuring 3m x 3m at its base and over 2.6m high. Comprising layer upon layer of stacked virgin cork coated in pure black pigment, the squatting sculpture dominates its setting. The work is impossible to understand in a single perspective and the spectator is forced to negotiate its sides and edges, unable to access its top.
Simultaneously awe inspiring and intimidating, elusive and alluring, Behemoth accesses a shared primal memory: the Kaaba of Mecca, a mausoleum to a long dead dignitary, an
inviolable alchemist’s box. Initially solid and impenetrable, closer inspection reveals the
gnarled, pitted unruly surface of the untreated, pigment-blackened cork, sourced from the area around Martin’s Portuguese studio. Its natural undulations and inconsistencies echo the raw, worked, sculptural surfaces of Martin’s pigments. The form of Behemoth, and its physical presence in the gallery space, echo the theatrical preoccupations of Minimalist
sculpture but the ancient and organic nature of the material conversely alludes to an inherent human narrative that belies these conceptual concerns.

Opposite – Behemoth, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 23rd, 2012

Lisson Gallery
52-54 Bell Street
London
NW1 5DA

www.lissongallery.com

  

SIMON MCWILLIAMS – SHOOTS AND LADDERS

Posted on 2012-05-28

Irish Artist Simon McWilliams brings his unique perspective on the urban landscape to the heart of Culver City’s art district with an exhibition of his new paintings at Skotia Gallery. McWilliams takes his observations of the city around him and filters them through his bold, painterly imagination. What he delivers is a fictional developing city, housing mysterious forms cloaked with impasto paint, reminiscent of Christo’s wrapped buildings. Not a drab concrete city but a new optimistic metropolis, resplendent in abundant, tactile colours, promising, “a glorious morrow”.

Sound drawing and painterliness combine to produce a unique vision that is part fact and part fantasy. Dust clouds created by ant-like workers on vast scaffolds, glitter in the sunlight taking on ghostly appearances. Victorian palm houses burst with growth; a profusion of exotic plants and organic shapes, green shoots grappling and seemingly merging with the cast iron struts, the natural and the manmade conjoin, to harness and energize the environment.

Opposite – Smoke and Ladders, 2011

Exhibition runs through to June 16th, 2012

Skotia Gallery
6144 Washington Blvd
Los Angeles
CA
90232

www.skotiagallery.com