Opening Thursday September 8th, 6 - 8 p.m. September 8 – October 8, 2011
Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present their second solo exhibition with German artist Stefanie Gutheil. Dreckige Katze (Dirty Cat) expands her playful and perverse painterly language and attempts to shine a flashlight in corners of the imagination that are perhaps best kept secret. Gutheil’s unruly cast of darkly comic characters burst forth from canvases as three dimensional paintings as well as sculptures.
Gutheil’s work is simultaneously intensely personal, sexually political and directly referential to the history of German painting. Psychologically driven, Gutheil selects her subject matter from encounters within her daily life—from immediate family to the club kid revelers of her Berlin neighborhood—transmogrifying them into grotesque characterizations.
Gutheil’s figures are disguised and androgynous, simultaneously juvenile yet endearing in their wholesale rejection of reality and exuberant indulgence in the vile. Gargoyle-like creatures made of wood masks and plastic animal parts sit atop glossy mounds of their own fecal matter, lightly suspended from the ceiling in delicate birdcages. Faux piles of sh*t cling to the wall thanks to their flamboyantly ornate golden frames, while the mutant figures of her paintings offer a sort of obligatory respite from the gloom and doom by way of vomiting rainbows or strands of plastic pearls.
Gutheil’s rendering of space is challenging, Bosch-esque. She says of the architecture of her paintings, “It’s impossible… these things, they are the things you keep down in the cellar; [metaphorically] the side of you that you don’t want anyone to know about. This is my sh*t, but everyone has it.”
Stefanie Gutheil was born in Ravensburg, Germany in 1980. She currently lives and works in Berlin, where she received both her Bachelors and Masters of Art from the Universität der Künste. In addition to this, her second solo exhibition in New York, she has exhibited in Canada and throughout Europe. Her work is included in public and private collections, most notably: The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY, The Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, New York, NY, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS and The Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan.
For further information or images please contact Anna Ortt, Director at [email protected]
Mike Weiss Gallery 520 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 Between 10th and 11th Avenues Nearest Subway: C/E 23rd Street & 8th Avenue Tel: 212- 691-6899 Fax: 212-691-6877 Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 10 to 6 www.mikeweissgallery.com
