The theme running through the various media in this show is the artist's fascination with the classic American film, The Wizard of Oz.
Massimo Audiello is pleased to present an exhibition of video, painting,
and digital prints by David Krippendorff. The show opens on Friday,
February 7, 2003, and will run through March 15, 2003.
Krippendorff was born in 1967 to a German father and an American mother,
but lived most of his childhood and teenage years in Rome before moving to
Berlin to study art. He now divides his time between New York City and
Berlin. This biographical information is useful for understanding the
poetic his work is built around. The theme running through the various
media in this show is the artist's fascination with the classic American
film, The Wizard of Oz.
To a young boy hoping to fashion a sense of home out of the fabric of
three different nationalities, Dorothy's adventure must have seemed an
anchoring promise and a welcome way to participate in a collective
imagination. But the child grows up, and this seemingly unifying fantasy
turns out to be an ominous example of American mythmaking. For these and
other reasons, the cinematic vision has become the seductive raw material
which the artist uses in sensuous and unexpected ways, to investigate and
question accepted notions of home, country and cultural identity.
Krippendorff's video, 'Beyond the moon...,' twists image and color to invert
the heroic journey and create a glittering sense of shattered promises.
The dream-like search for a road home is shown to be closer to an
enchanting nightmare. The artist's large 'curtain paintings' displace and
disorient the film even further; movie stills become wavelike illusions of
image and light and evocative still lives which offer a stirring sense of
doubt against Hollywood's over-simplified notions of home. The glossy
sheen of digital photographs continues the strategic duality between
beauty and danger. Cold and seductive, these images play with the allure
of the film's scenery while at the same time using the material distance
of painting and print to question the value of these myths.
Image: Negative Painting #5, 2001 \ Oil on canvas \ 103x75"
MASSIMO AUDIELLO
526 West 26th Street No.519
New York, NY 10001
212.675.9082 TEL
212.675.8680 FAX