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until 07.04. | #1874ARTatBerlin | Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin shows since 15th February 2018 the exhibition “Standbilder” by the artist Marc Desgrandchamps.
Cut shapes emerge or disappear, isolated or along with appearances that testify to a similar, more or less pronounced instability. Transparency and opacity effects, scale distortions and other deviations. Extensive areas that occasionally contain inconspicuous architectures or pieces of furniture. A blue sky. Male or female figures whose facial features have been eradicated. They indicate a movement or remain lazy. Sometimes they turn their backs to us. Athlete. Horses. Birds. Plants. References to an existing art history (Stubbs’ Antiquity) or an imagined one (abstract paintings are placed as “pictures in the picture”, two of them we encounter in one of the artist’s rarely painted interior views). Unidentifiable objects can sometimes be guessed by shadows. And finally, above all, we see “painterly signs” suspended in a state of suspension that eludes any representational logic. Unless the said signs express the compositional or decomposing states peculiar to the metamorphoses mentioned above. These are all elements through which Marc Desgrandchamps’ paintings join the (dis) continuity of his previous works. Rarely has the artist confronted us with such a complementarity and variety of “painterly” signs in a series of works in quick succession.
Desgrandchamps, as usual, develops scenarios that are full of narrative possibilities and at the same time, according to a modernist tradition, in a temporality that is torn as if from a continuous stream, like a scratched DVD or a video game, or like one of them “Still images”, from which the artist devises a multitude of details of his compositions. The resulting tension here reaches an enthralling as well as obstinate paroxysmal stage.
Excerpt from Marc Desgrandchamps. Simultaneous contradictions of Erik Verhagen
Translation by Lucia Schreyer
Vernissage: Thursday, 15th February 2018, 5 – 9 p.m.
Exhibition period: Thursday, 15th February to Saturday, 07th April 2018
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Image caption: Marc Desgrandchamps, o.T., 2017, oil on canvas, 162 x 97 cm, photo: Studio Julien Bouvier
Exhibition Marc Desgrandchamps – Standbilder – EIGEN + ART Berlin | Contemporary Art – Kunst in Berlin – ART at Berlin
