Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut is very pleased to invite you to its new show Less Roses curated by the German artist, Elger Esser : � Less Roses is an odd title for an exhibition; as odd and difficult as it is to curate a show in Lebanon, a country that is constantly revisited by political turmoil. This show is not a political statement, it is about art that speaks for itself. Can art represent without the temptation of embellishment? Art can be subversive without being politically correct . In the Title � Less Roses � Less expresses the danger of disappearance�but also less can be a sign of concentration on quality�Roses: Flowers are a symbol of natural beauty �� E.E. Elger Esser invited artists and friends to join him in this adventure. All of them made new works for the Beirut show, Elger Esser and Felix Schramm came to Beirut and are making on site works
Moritz Altmann born 1975 in Marburg, lives and works in Hamburg, Germany
Altmann has just graduated from the HamburgArtSchool. In his sculptures he uses baroque forms - shifting between the opposing poles of naturalism and the irrational grotesque.
Yto Barrada born 1971 in Paris, lives and works in Tangier, Morocco and Paris, France. Barrada's photography and videos reflect her double cultural identity and raise the question of the �passage� between South and North, North Africa and Europe. The installation shown in the space was partly made for the 2007 Venice Biennale, where the artist is showing simultaneously.
Iris Tingitana Project IRIS TINGITANA is one of Tangier�s native flowers, and takes its name from the city�s Latin one. The Tingitane peninsula of northern Morocco is a place of great biodiversity, home to the highest concentration of indigenous species on the Mediterrenean. Since long before the Romans, human development has left its traces on this environment without defiing it. Over the past ten years, though, marketplaces, pastures, and formerly protected forests and historic buildings are being handed over to developers of hotels, housing, and shopping malls, in a fast-forward push to replicate the spanish Costa del Sol, a high-density suburban sprawl of mass sunshine tourism. The decisionmakers� broader goal, conscious or not, is a new, clean, globally marketable Morocco in which the only indigenous species visible in public are those branded by modernity or neatly framed by their folkloric status. Wildflowers, like street kids, men napping in parks, roadside picnickers, farmers selling produce, and clandestine pastoral lovers, will soon have no place. Flowers are wrongly considered inherently poetic. Here they have quietly become political. The overnight appearance in Tangier�s traffic circles of thousands of pink geraniums, in aseasonal full bloom, or the quick march of imported palm trees from the south along the corniche of Tangier speak in botanical code of the new grammar of power. January is also the month in which the local Irises bloom, and this year, in in-between spaces � on rutted consruction sites, along incomplete highway spans and in the remaining graveyards and grasslands -- the surviving endangered wild iris, sage, and pines still bore stoic witness to their city�s irreversible transformation. Yto Barrada, Tangier April 2007
Elger Esser born 1967 in Stuttgart, lives and works in D�sseldorf, Germany
The renowned German photo artist shows a two-part body of work. The first part is composed of large-sized photography of historic shipwrecks which evoke a poetic impression of fleetingness; the second part is an installation with ten vitrines, filled with souvenirs, paintings and photography from Lebanon recalling the country�s �lost landscapes� and the fragility of cultural identities.
Peter Hopkins born 1955 in Framingham, Massachusetts, lives and works in New York
Peter Hopkins� working concept is using everyday materials like cloth, fabrics, foils, cleaning agents, industrial lacquers, perfume, oils and cosmetics in order to make highly esthetical , mostly monochromic paintings without using brush and artistic colors. His paintings are a recycling of elder materials in the tradition of the early American immigrants.
Glen Rubsamen born 1957 in Hollywood, USA, lives and works in D�sseldorf, Germany
In his paintings, Rubsamen creates hyper-realistic images that play with the idea of photographic simulation, using silhouettes of trees and rocks, as a constant leitmotif, as though they were underdeveloped film negatives. The work is characterized by a documentary interest in compiling, like collectibles, situations in nature of great dramatic intensity in the romantic tradition, such as sunrises and sunsets, exuberant vegetation, or images of the apocalypse. Rubsamen is the painter of a nature where the organic appears in artificial images. His paintings stand apart from the conventional notion of landscape, they afford an altogether new vision of the natural world.
Felix Schramm born 1970 in Hamburg, lives and works in D�sseldorf, Germany
Made from drywall, paint, steel frames, and wood, Schramm site-specific installations challenge the viewers to discern where the artwork ends and the gallery�s architecture begins. His twisted, splintered fragments of structural forms � walls, ceilings, floors � burst from the building's framework at dramatic angles, producing large-scale works that seem at once threatening and fragile. Schramm presents a new piece that continues his pursuit of achieving balance between chaos and order, the particular and the universal, and offers visitors an experience of physical tension.
