15 March to 15 May 2013 Opening 15 March at 8:00 p.m.
Galería Pilar Serra presents the first exhibition in Madrid of the work of German artist Rainer Splitt, resident in Berlin, after having displayed various pieces by him in its stand at Arco 2013.
The work of this artist has a radical clarity that is based on colour, monochromatic works which we are not sure whether to identify as paintings or sculptures – perhaps we could speak of painted sculptures. His form of working has gradually evolved since 1988 when he began with three-dimensional objects, to his first poured paintings in 1990, stains of colour, a mixture of painting and synthetic emulsions which, spilt on a surface, emerge as intense forms with a great deal of luminosity; in the act of pouring, Rainer studies the qualities of the liquid, its potential to spread and the gradual drying process, a process which appears to be casual, and which is a form of asking questions, questions related to space and its relation with matter, line, colour, to which each viewer ought perhaps to provide their own answer.
His boxes irremediably lead to Donald Judd and to American minimalism which Splitt evidently has in mind though he is a long way from the hermetically perfect boxes of the master, paraphrasing them in low cost PVC boxes, boxes which change their aesthetic function of ascetic purity and become living containers of paint in which the paint sometimes flows and is transferred from one box to another though the artist then undermines the sequence of his work process by deliberately interrupting the succession which could seem to us to be logical, mixing the colours.
In any case, Rainer Splitt usually works on series: boxes, paper, fabrics, all impregnated with paint, leading art critics to relate his work to a painter such as Morris Louis, to the iron sculptures of Richard Serra or the spatial concepts of Robert Smithson. In the words of Konrad Bitterli: "His work seems to be firmly located within the artistic manifestations of the decades of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What is crucial, nevertheless, is that his work does not allow itself to be reduced to those traditions and, in fact, it renews and reinterprets them in an extraordinarily precise and brilliant way."
From his beginnings in the middle of the ‘80s, he has spent his life in places such as Nimes, New York, Bonn, until establishing his residence in Berlin.
In recent years he has exhibited his work in the Celle Art Museum, the Kunstverein Ruhr in Essen, the Kunstverein Aichach, the Goethe Institut of Lithuania, the Museum of Concrete Art of Ingolstadt, and in the Max Weber Gallery in Munich.
The sample, the first in Spain, composed of painted papers, boxes, paint poured on the floor, will give us an overall view of this artist and his strong personality which updates tradition with a new and refreshing look.
GALERIA PILAR SERRA C/ Santa Engracia, 6 Bajo Centro 28010 Madrid Tlf: +34 91 308 15 69 / 70 www.pilarserra.com
For further information and photographs / T: 91 308 15 69 / www.pilarserra.com / galeria@pilarserra.com
