Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne

CHRISTOPH STEINMEYER : ‘Hotel Déjàvu’

Christoph Steinmeyer belongs to a generation of artists that undercut both the authenticity of painting and the sources of their visual exploration. Since the mid-1990s, the Dusseldorf artist has been focussing on a kind of magical symbolism, and his subjects and artistic style resemble hybrids that have entered into a dangerous, deep-rooted liaison ever since.

Christoph Steinmeyer, 'Rebecca', 2005, oil on canvas, 202 x 257,5 cm

Les Rogers, ‘Letter to’, 2005, Oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches

Leo Koenig Inc, New York

LES ROGERS : Recent Paintings

At first glance, Rogers' paintings appear as peculiarly graceful yet muscular abstraction. But Rogers creates his paintings by layering images, one atop another, saturating the canvas, at times creating a kind of visual white noise. The sources are too numerous and varied for the eye to differentiate immediately. Stacked and carefully compiled, these images meld into frenetic, yet considered works that move in and out of abstraction to representation at a blink of an eye. The fine line between precision and chaos, power and collapse, destruction and creation, presents itself as a composition that is at once thought out and allowed to develop.

GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF, Stuttgart

Stephan Jung 'God in Game'

Jung tackles the fixation of an avatar (his alter ego) in the medium of painting. Avatar means a kind of virtual stand-in for a person in cyberspace, an artificial look-alike of a member or a player in chat forum‘s or computer games. The concept of avatar derives from “avatara“ which in Indian religion means the descent or incarnation of a God on earth. It is in this virtual world of cybergames and equipped with all the functions needed to empower him to succeed in a fantasy adventure that “God in Game“ in the silvery, shimmering animation of the artist enters into the realms of our world. But in a (painted) image of something real, what is really real?

Stephan Jung 'God in Game', Galerie Reinhard Hauff

Annie Kevans 'Arafat' 2006, oil on paper

Sartorial Contemporary Art, London

Beyond the Grave - Painting Power, Painting Death : Gordon Cheung • Annie Kevans • Hugh Mendes

Power, money and death seem to inhabit a world beyond everyday life, provoking horror and fascination in equal measure. Though we all might pine for a taste of wealth and omnipotence from time to time, the rich and powerful smack of evil, as if success stripped the over-ambitious of their souls. Saddam Hussein, Elvis Presley, Bill Gates and even Andy Warhol have all achieved some level of immortality, and for that they have become objects of both contempt and desire. A dictator, a rock star, an entrepreneur and an artist make a strange group, but all of these guys seem to have licked life's great inevitable, and that makes them both obscene and irresistible.

M.Y.ART PROSPECTS, New York

Fallah's latest works are acrylics on canvas that create dark quasi-architectural spaces within which bright colorful fragments swarm and scatter as if in the aftermath of an explosion or in the process of transformation. The ambiguity and transience of the "mess" create an eerie contrast to the surrounding walls that appear untouched, clean and silent.

Amir H. Fallah, Untitled 2006 acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 in.

Stéphane Calais, Une fleur de mars, 2005, acrylic, ink, and glitter on canvas, 25 1/2 x 21 3/4 in.

Ziehersmith, New York

Stéphane Calais: Laces and Falbala

In his first solo exhibition in the United States, French artist Stéphane Calais draws inspiration from lace’s translucent allure and the decorative flounces and ruffles known as falbala. With these royal symbols of courtly affluence and fashion as a point of reference, Calais applies a multiplicity of styles, intermixing the high and the low with an irreverent attitude toward classification.

As Lili Reynaud Dewar has written “For Calais, what is alive is precisely that which cannot be described, that which escapes any kind of clarifying transmission, any kind of anticipation. In his work, then, there are no attempts to establish a programme, only grand and overflowing intentions.”

Eric Dupont, Paris

Café Hawelka : Yigal Ozeri

The Cafe Hawelka in Vienna, like the Obnecni Dum cafe in Prague or the cafe New York Hungaria in Budapest, is one of the last remnants of a long tradition of writer’s cafes in Central Europe. Leopold Hawelk and his wife Josephine manage this establishment much as they did 60 years ago when they opened it. Many artists -- from Nicolas Harnnoncourt, the orchestra chief to the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer – still meet there today.

Robert Gutierrez, Untitled (Frog). 2006, mixed media on panel

Sixtyseven, New York

ROBERT GUTIERREZ : fever atlas

Gutierrez's work is usually intimate in scale, intensely colored and finely detailed. A combination of landscape painting, figurative work and abstraction, Gutierrez's paintings tend to invoke open-ended narratives with a nod to Filipino-folk supernaturalism.
Gutierrez's paintings lie in-between naïve and sophisticated, where spiritual imagery can be mistaken for childlike sci-fi fascination. His figures are flat and folksy while the landscapes are rocky and futuristic. His painting process is playful, where a paint blob might take the shape of a figure, reemerge as a flower and flatten back again.

FIEBACH & MINNINGER, Cologne

Trine Boesen / Benny Dröscher: "Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen den Wald?!?!"

The title for the exhibition comes from the composer Alban Berg's : Altenberg-lieder.

Alban Berg wrote in 1912 these Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by the Poet Peter Altenberg.The title suggests the spectator to seize the opportunity for a rare moment. One of these moments where the rain has washed all your conventions away – has cleared your view – and has given you the opportunity to see the exhibition in a different light.

Trine Boesen, “Deep under cover”, 2005, mixed media auf Leinwand, 50x50cm