Adam Adach chemical sunset October 6 – November 3, 2007 Opening Reception: October 6, 6-8pm
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with painter Adam Adach who lives between Warsaw and Paris. The exhibition will consist of canvases created during his three-month stay in New York, which opened up a new range of subject matter and a more accentuated subjectivity to his practice. Images drawn from newspaper clippings intertwined with personal snapshots and popular culture visual cues reinstate history to a dream like effect in Adach’s paintings.
The three large works in the show that make up the series Day After/Pelham Bay/ are based on Adach’s experience of an urban beach during low tide strewn with curved engines and corroded vessels. These relics give the scene an anti-utopian feel and act as points of departure for canvases based on events during WWI, Stalinist dictatorship, Nazi invasion of Europe, the Space Race, as well as more recent history.
The painting Enemies is based on a photograph from a French newspaper from WWI showing German marines diving off a cliff into the Adriatic Sea. The Rally documents a congress held by the extreme right political party in Poland after it assumed power in 2004. The circular composition is illuminated by blue light which gives the scene the feel of a science fiction movie. Here, as in other works, Adach filters a record of a historic event through visual elements of popular culture as well as his own subjectivity bringing the event into the present.
In 2007 Adam Adach had a solo show titled Portraits. Mirrors. at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland. A fully illustrated catalog was published in connection with the exhibition. In 2006 he was included in an exhibition Le Mouvement des Images at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Adach has been nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2007.
Front Room Karin Sander October 6 – November 3, 2007 Opening Reception: October 6, 6-8pm
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present our third solo exhibition with German conceptual artist Karin Sander. The exhibition will consist of works from the series titled Mailed Paintings. Without prior manipulation the primed store-bought canvases were mailed unwrapped to the gallery from various international locations thus visually transcribing the distance by collecting marks on their unprotected surfaces along the journey.
The Mailed Paintings along with Gebrauchsbilder (pictures for use) are projects that are part of a larger body of work titled The Patina Paintings. In Gebrauchsbilder the paintings start out as blank canvases and autonomously create themselves by absorbing the patina of the environment where they are installed for a period of time, such as a coal cellar or deck of a ship. In a similar way, the Mailed Paintings collect patina from handling and the exposure to the elements along their postal route and are considered done when they arrive at the gallery.
The monochromatic white surfaces act as self-writing diaries that record the journey of the work. This process embraces chance and risk and points to the larger conceptual practice of Karin Sander, who always operates in the extended field of painting by putting an emphasis on the environment of the exhibition and the circumstances surrounding it, like in her well-known polished wall pieces. The collected patina exaggerates and mirrors the effect of the passage of time on the surface of the painting, and her installation in the gallery is reminiscent of both Suprematism and the ready-made.
In 2007 Karin Sander was featured in a group exhibition titled What Is Painting? at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2006 Karin Sander had a solo exhibition at SAFN, Reykjavik, Iceland. Her work has been shown at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart Germany among many others.
