LUSH STROKES, PHANTOM FORMS

LUSH STROKES, PHANTOM FORMS

Curator: Pujan Gandhi

If we operate under the premise that the role of artist is to give spirit form, it goes without saying that abstraction and representation are simultaneous aesthetic and emotional concerns. It’s the power—and process—of apprehending allusion that enraptures us most.

 Lush Strokes, Phantom Forms features six contemporary artists, operating across the globe, whose selected works typify Robert Ryman’s prophetic (yet intuitive) assertion: “Abstract Painting is just beginning…All Possibilities are open to it. ” While the dawn of a categorically ‘abstract’ art in the Western canon is most attributed to post-war Abstract Expressionists, who often probed heroic and existential quests, today, it could be argued that artists working in this vein are more so looking towards the viewer, testing boundaries by honing individual processes that privilege our mutable perceptions. In an era characterized by multiple simultaneities and constant shifts, this exhibition revels in the complex ways ‘painting’ and ‘abstraction’ have proven infinitely absorbent, still transcendent, vehicles of expression.

Rachel Howard (b. UK, 1969) creates paintings which flow from corporeal experiences, where atomized and patterned pigment transforms from the inchoate to the intensely profound:

Secundino Hernández (b. Spain, 1975) deftly reveals the tensions inherent in building a painting.

Andreas Eriksson (b.1975, Sweden) gently reminds us of painting’s function as a window, capturing the totality of light and space.

Paul Fägerskiöld (b.1982, Sweden) realizing painting’s potential as an observational tool, employs a slightly more structured logic.The result offers an alluring sensory stasis in which form and formlessness thusly co-exist.

Matthias Bitzer (b. 1975, Germany) expands the field of process-based abstraction into three-dimensions, creating an integrated, multi-media body of work which explores physical, perceptual, and intellectual dislocation.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b.1968, Germany) is a master photographer whose lens captures visceral flashes of collective familiarity.

Beyond offering a glimpse onto the selected artists’ respective agencies, Lush Strokes, Phantom Forms celebrates the boundless possibility of a contemporary mode abstraction that is neither abrasive nor sedentary. With work that is sublime in spirit yet objective in its execution, it will be left to the viewer to pause and conjure his or her own desire for form.

  

 

 


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