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David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street: NEO RAUCH | KATY SCHIMERT - 12 May 2008 to 21 June 2008 Current Exhibition |
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NEO RAUCH
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NEO RAUCH 12 May 2008 to 21 June 2008 Opening Reception: Monday, May 12, 6-8 PM David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by German painter Neo Rauch. In 2007, Rauch was the subject of a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which then traveled to the Max Ernst Museum in Br�hl, Germany. He has had one-person exhibitions at such prestigious museums as Rudolfinum Prag, Prague, Czech Republic (2007); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2006); Mus�e d�art Contemporain de Montr�al, Montreal, Canada (2006); Centro de Arte Contempor�neo M�laga, M�laga, Spain (2005); and the Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2004). This will be the artist�s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Educated at the now legendary Hochschule f�r Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany, Rauch (b. 1960) has become one of his generation�s most influential and virtuoso painters. He continues the rich tradition of Leipzig figurative painting. The artist transforms typical industrious scenes into veritable dreamscapes, transporting viewers to a deeply personal and enigmatic, symbolic universe. Rauch does not rely on existing imagery or models for his paintings, and while some begin as tiny sketches, he works his imagined scenes directly onto the canvas. He likens his process to reading a novel, with the paintings unfolding as surprisingly for their maker as for any viewer. Springing from dreams and shaped by experience, both past and present, Rauch�s instinctive imagery and automatic approach exceed straightforwardly Surrealist concerns and restrictive exercise. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rauch does not set out to create a cohesive group of paintings for his exhibitions. Made without preconceptions, the pictures fertilize one another in the studio, with colors, symbols, and forms (cartoon-like and realistically rendered) drifting and reappearing among canvases. In many of his compositions, hulking figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, bizarre and often barren landscapes, or domestic interiors. Rauch�s fascination with the figure and work-related props allow for a formal exploration, based in part on the properties of paint itself. A swirling puddle on the ground, for example, or the tumbling folds of brightly colored fabric, blur the line between rendered object and reference to the artist�s materials. Inspired as much by Old Masters as by the rebelliousness of painters Georg Baselitz and J�rg Immendorff, Rauch�s work refuses fixed interpretation and defies categorization. In Das Gut, 2008, the artist presents three figures seemingly embroiled in a lovers� quarrel, as a disquietingly stoic heroine stands between a man wielding a sword and his defenseless victim. Upon closer inspection, a stranger scene is revealed, as the male figures� legs converge and dissolve into an amorphous finlike appendage. In the background, the same threesome is involved in an equally nebulous scene. Despite the art historical precedence, this gesture of continuous narrative, common to early Italian Renaissance painting, highlights feelings of disorientation. Influenced by writer L�on Bloy, Rauch explores the philosophy that events occur simultaneously, rather than successively. By allowing multiple moments to visually coalesce on one canvas, his paintings act as an apt metaphor for this understanding of existence. More poignantly, the works also function reflexively as allegories of painting and the creative process. For Rauch, the creative process can be plagued with expectations, restrictions, and limitations � practical and theoretical, external and self-imposed � provoking an acute tension that pervades every aspect of the works. This tension is epitomized by the gripping Parabel, 2008. Amidst a discordant industrial landscape, an artist falls before his blank canvas, his neck tethered by a noose. The feelings of paralyzation, depression, fear, and vulnerability that characterize the creative process, and ultimately human existence, are presented honestly and poetically. KATY SCHIMERT The Monster May 28 - June 21, 2008 Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 28, 6 - 8 PM David Zwirner is pleased to inaugurate its new exhibition space at 533 West 19th Street with an exhibition by New York artist Katy Schimert. Previously used as a private viewing room, the space will now host a series of small-scale public exhibitions � showing suites of photographs, drawings, and prints � giving gallery artists an opportunity to present bodies of work in an intimate setting. In The Monster, Schimert debuts fourteen works on paper. Initially begun as studies for an outdoor sculpture project, the fully developed series of watercolors, which comprises The Monster, demonstrates the fluidity and holism of the artist�s concerns across media. Schimert uses fragments of personal experience as conceptual impetus and the intersection of the fine and decorative arts as a formal point of departure. Densely layered and vaguely topographical, this new series of drawings explores the transmutation of man into monster. Extending beyond physiological investigations, the works simultaneously function as deeply probing portraits of psychological transformation, pain, anxiety, repression, and loss, recalling Th�odore G�ricault�s early 19th-century paintings of psychiatric patients. Schimert�s dynamic surfaces, created by intricate lines and transparent washes of paint, result in what she describes as �space for illusion,� refuting their own two-dimensionality, while offering the human form as a physical container for encoded thoughts and symbols. Revealing the interior structure of her forms, the works suggest the vulnerability of both the medium and subject matter, with multiple layers of paint bleeding through one another. The artist�s gloomy palette of blacks, grays, and browns, punctuated by vein-like tracks of saturated color, addresses her interest in 19th-century horror novels, crime fiction, and noir films. Together these introspective works present a poetically deconstructed sequence without an obvious beginning or end � visually compelling, emotionally evocative, and formally succinct. Schimert works in sculpture, drawing, film, and installation. Since 1993, the artist has exhibited widely throughout North America and Europe. Schimert was recently in Toronto, Canada, lecturing as part of the Anne Lind International Program. She has been the focus of one-person exhibitions at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1999) and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (1997). She was recently included in the group exhibitions: �drawling, stretching and fainting in coils�, Fest-Spiele+ 2007, Pinakothek der Moderne and Nationaltheater, Munich, Germany (2007); Sculptors Drawing, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2007); and Space Is the Place, organized by Independent Curators International and traveling to six venues throughout the United States from 2006 to 2008. |
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