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until 04.11. | #1492ARTatBerlin | ALEXANDER OCHS PRIVATE presents new artworks of the painter Chris Newman and ceramic works of korean artist Young-Jae Lee opening on September 12, 2017.
Opened by Florian Illies, Villa Grisebach, at Alexander Ochs in Charlottenburg
Monday, September 11, 2017, 7 pm, as the kick-off of Berlin Art Week, preview from now on possible.
The latest works of the Berlin-based composer, musician, author and visual artist Chris Newman are reminiscent of the palimpsests of antiquity, of the overwriting of parchments that have already been written on. Due to a shortage of papyrus and parchment, and also for reasons of cost, the bearers of writings were scraped, scratched, washed and cleaned so that they could again be written on.
For his new works, created in 2017, Newman used canvases that he had already painted on. Paintings from eight, nine or ten years ago that he newly covered with ‘gesso’, which is usually used as white primer. We already came across ‘gesso’ in Egyptian antiquity: paint made from plaster or chalk, sometimes also mixed with white pigment and hare hide glue. The mixture was used for painting the clasps and lids of mummy caskets or as primer for frescos in dwellings and temples.
And that is the second attribute that can be said of these paintings by Chris Newman: he overpaints his ‘old’ paintings with ‘gesso’, often with a very broad brush, and draws in the still-wet application of paint with a graphite pencil. The lines that come into being are easily guided and sensitive, and are reminiscent of engravings. Lines, motifs and colours from the ‘old’ works often show through, providing a hint of the idea behind the paintings that have originally been alive; pictures as reincarnations, combining what was originally there with what is yet to come.
Chris Newman grew up in London, before coming to Cologne in 1980 to study composition under Mauricio Kagel. Some of the works he created in 2017 depict figures from this childhood; the world of the children’s author and illustrator Beatrix Potter, born in 1866, also in London. Other paintings hint at paintings from Daumier or Vallotton as initiators in the background. So ‘La Blanche et la Noire’ from 1913 meets the mice Timmy Willie and Hunca Munca and Little Pig Robinson. And while Newman’s paintings transport us on a journey through time back to antiquity, the Korean artist Young-Jae Lee’s vases and pots allow us a ‘contemplative pause’, a yet further way into ourselves and into – as formulated by Matthias Flügge – “archetypal memories”. In his encomium for the occasion of the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Wrocław Academy of the Arts, the principal of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts formulated thus: “Earthy clay and fire are the oldest materials that man used in order to give form to the things in his life. The bowl reproduces the shape of hands joined together to create things; it is the primeval form of the process of civilisation. So time and again, we therefore find a connection in the everyday yet vital process of drinking.”
Vernissage: Monday, 11th September 2017, 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
Due to limited space a reservation is needed: assistenz@alexanderochs-private.com.
Exhibition period: Tuesday, 12th September to Saturday, 4th November 2017
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Image caption Chris Newman, 17-001, 2017, 50 x 40 cm, Gesso und Graphit auf Leinwand, Courtesy ALEXANDER OCHS PRIVATE
ExhibitionSo machen wir das! – Alexander Ochs Private – Kunst in Berlin ART at Berlin
