June 18 -July 1, 2005
Andreas Grimm München (formerly Grimm | Rosenfeld)
Munich, Germany
Artists
Joe Zucker, Jeff Grant, Dominik Halmer, Kent Henricksen, David Renggli, Matt Saunders, Lisa Tan, Lesley Vance
Grimm|Rosenfeld, Munich presents Mind Over Manner, a group exhibition featuring an important early painting by Joe Zucker that, until now, has never before been on public view. The gallery will also exhibit new work by emerging artists Jeff Grant, Dominik Halmer, Kent Henricksen, David Renggli, Matt Saunders, Lisa Tan, and Lesley Vance. This exhibition, like the entire body of Joe Zucker's work, highlights the challenge of conveying intellectual rigor through meticulous and beautiful art objects.
In 1975, Joe Zucker created “Burp,” one of his storied Cotton Ball Paintings. Zucker’s cotton project problematized many aspects of artistic practice in general and, specifically, pitted minimalist and Pop art subjects against each other. In “Burp,” Zucker’s common use of antebellum and Civil War era iconography is present in the form of a cartoonish bol weevil, whose presence refers to the disturbing conditions of cotton production as well as the materiality of the cotton painting itself. Mind Over Manner takes Zucker’s cue in exploring the work of seven emerging artists who also struggle to ply their compositions with an accessible and relevant subtext.
Dominik Halmer denies the notion of beauty altogether in his ecstatic canvases. By rejecting taste as a guide, he paints from the unconscious, letting colors vacillate between muddy and fluorescent. In Halmer’s large-scale work, his abstract strokes commingle with figures of grotesque hands and cartoonish dolls.
Conversely, Lisa Tan and Jeff Grant cultivate an austere aesthetic, which underpins their conceptual compositions. Working mainly with silhouettes, Grant layers gothic and suburban imagery in his ink drawings on mylar, hinting at dark mythologies underlying the social fabric. Lisa Tan’s sculpture, “Ellsworth Kelly,” is based on a gift of name cards she gave to the artist after having dinner with him in Los Angeles. By encasing one of these cards with Kelly’s name atop a black, lacquered pedestal and under a plexiglas vitrine, Tan investigates how names are elevated and abstracted to stand-in for larger ideas and bodies of work.
Painters Matt Saunders and Lesley Vance share a romantic affinity. Saunders’ three paintings made on large sheets of mylar, depict three actresses caught on the brink of sleep. Painted on both sides and to the outer edges of the mylar, these beautiful, cryptic scenes (culled from film stills) resonate on screens of the artist’s making. Influenced in part by Warhol’s “Sleep,” these pictures form their own rendition of the film screen, moving the representational plane into new territory.
In the overgrown, cannibalistic forests crowding Lesley Vance’s two paintings, Vance correlates beauty and danger, turning landscapes on their ear, meanwhile leaving her pictures unresolved with areas that lack density and belie the perfection of the paintings.
Swiss artist, David Renggli, creates mystery with banal objects through the use of mirroring, doubling and unreal relationships. In his ceramic twig sculpture, Renggli carves out the words, "Lust and Moral" from the beak of a small bird. Painted in brown glacé, the twig could mirror human excrement, therefore shuttling the viewer back and forth from amusement and revulsion.
In Kent Henricksen’s harrowing canvases made from bourgeois tapestries, he takes existing scenes and twists their bucolic intent. Through embroidery, Henricksen uses techniques germane to his materials to turn docile decorative art into work haunted by ghosts and murderous hoods.