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until 30.06. | #1380ARTatBerlin | Philipp Haverkampf Galerie shows from 26th May 2017 the exhibition “Sun Toxic City” by the artists Shara Hughes and Robert Vellekoop.
DeepDream ‘Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night, through the day. Riding, riding, riding. And the courage has grown so tired, and the longing so great.’
What has merely come out of our adventures, which have led us across the hot asphalt, dusty gravel roads, through strange places, over remote passes, and finally to the sea. Toward even more remote inner and outer goals?
Instead of smartphones, there was a train ticket for an extended summer, which took us into the distance – one did not know what one would expect. And now, the illusion that the world has become smaller through the hasty development and extension of our sensory organs.
Shara Hughes (*1981), lives and works in NY, where she has recently celebrated a widespread breakthrough with her paintings, with exhibitions such as: Trips I’ve never been On , Marlborough Contemporary, Lamenting, Sighing, Weeping , Gallery Met, Whitney Biennial 2017 , Whitney Museum of American Art, and Same Space Different Day, at Rachel Uffner.
Enigmatic, dreamlike landscapes, undefined places of longing, triggered by a diffuse wanderlust, which must continue to roam – in a world where there is not much to discover, as everything is already documented and publicly shared – there the artist offers us a new frame through which our gaze is directed, through a collaged image-space. Here, various painting techniques and styles collide chaotically and on top of each other and create a psychedelic landscape – inviting us to go on a new inner journey.
These images appear to be shadows of memories in which the seen and the experienced shift wildly into one another, or in reversal, expectations in the form of vague ideas which we had, when we – before a journey – still nurtured wild dreams and fantasies about the unknown distant ambitions/destination to come. Either way, toxic shadows of inner images of a dreamlike wild nature, places of increased longing, awaiting the fulfilment of freedom and happiness.
Robert Vellekoop (*1984) lives and works in Hamburg, we are also sent to strange, almost pictogram-reduced places in his work. Likewise dreamlike, abstracted and characterless, human-less, urban landscapes, which, in their absurdity, seem to have sprung from the remnants of utopian urban planning, and emphasise the formally interchangeable and continuously repetitive aspects of modern urban surroundings.
They appear like cut-outs from other, more ramified cities, in which shadowy buildings rise, between which paths in absurd directions duplicate, wind, cross, almost compulsively seeking a path. These could be endless loops, in cities where it is only a question of keeping on the move, rather than ever reaching a goal.
Multiple gateways, like goals, negate themselves by repetition. One goal follows the next, there is no arriving and in the resolution of front and background, of above and below, it is only the (sparse) lights of the lamps, which promise us orientation and support.
In Vellekoop’s work, there is a rigor and clarity that leads to an efficacy, which appears to be overly necessary for today’s planning of cities. With Hughes on the other hand, we are met with the total anarchic and organic chaos of a wild, expanding nature. What is common to both is that they develop these environments without concrete references to existing places, referring instead to imagined scenes in their heads. Images that bring remembered experiences into a structure and activate universal ideas.
Vernissage: Wednesday, 24th May 2017, 6 to 9 p.m.
Exhibition period: Friday, 26th May to Friday, 30th June 2017
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Image caption: Shara Hughes “Eclipse”, 2015 crayon, oil crayon, marker on paper 38.1 x 27.94 cm/ 15 x 11 in
Exhibitions Berlin Galleries: Shara Hughes + Robert Vellekoop – Sun Toxic City – Philipp Haverkampf Galerie | ART at Berlin
