Painting is Thinking� Anne Gathmann and Kysa Johnson
17 April � 16 May 2009 Opening Thursday 16 April 6-9pm
Gallery talk: Friday 17th April 6.30pm - the artists in conversation with artist and RA lecturer Vanessa Jackson
Painting is Thinking� presents two artists for whom painting is a direct means by which to understand the world (internal and external) more closely � scientifically, emotionally, and intellectually. The techniques employed and the marks made result from the artists� researches into the invisible world. Anne Gathmann (DE) works in painting and in site-specific installation. Key to her practice is giving substance (or an illusion of substance) to the ephemeral and unseen. Where her delicate interventions into public spaces attempt to foreground aspects of a given space that are not immediately apparent, her paintings give form to a subjective inner space.
Gathmann floods sheets of paper with wet paint till they wrinkle and rebel against their two dimensions. Displayed either in closely related series, or taped together to construct what become sculptural wall hangings, the individual pieces are always engaged in a broader conversation. Her soft forms � semi biomorphic, evocative of bodies, pillows, or growing things, are sunk in the warp and weft of the undulating surface. Other more geometric pieces begin to suggest the tessellations of fabric hanging, the wave of flags and banners, and seem celebratory and extrovert by comparison.
Anne Gathmann was born in 1973 and lives and works in Berlin. She is represented by Stedefreund, Berlin, where her solo show In the misty rain, mount Fuji is veiled all day, how intriguing, took place in 2008. Other projects include NN at Institut im Glaspavillon der Volksb�hne, Berlin, 2007, and Affirmation, m&n;, Berlin (solo) in 2006. Kysa Johnson (USA) employs scientific elements and theories to make conceptual reinterpretations of traditional painterly subjects. Using specific microscopic forms � ie the shapes of bacteria which act as diseases and their cures, or the molecular structure of pollutants - as the building blocks of her mark-making, Johnson refers the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, and encourages us to step out of our habitual view and perceive these tiny creatures as phenomena to be appreciated on their own terms. She revels in the inherent complexity of our ecosystem.
In the series Landscape/Pollutant, Johnson�s versions of utopian landscapes (largely from the Hudson River School) are composed of the varying molecular structures of the environmental pollutants ethane, methane, propane, hexane, benzene, and acrolein. In the series Battle/Disease/Cure, Uccello�s groundbreaking Battle of San Romano (c 1450) is painted using the chemical �signatures� of Plague virus and its cure � streptomyces. Working in ink, watercolour and graphite in her paintings, Johnson also makes intensely beautiful and detailed site specific works in chalk on blackboard paint. For Standpoint, Johnson will display new paintings based on Constable�s views of Hampstead Heath, alongside a newly commissioned wall drawing.
Kysa Johnson was born in Illinois in 1974, and trained at Glasgow School of Art. She iives and works in New York. Solo projects include upcoming at Roebling Hall gallery, New York, Autumn 2009, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, 2004. Her work is on permanent display at the Empire State Building.
