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6/11/2014

Herbert Hamak / Dan Walsh

Galerie Xippas, Geneve

Herbert Hamak’s artwork falls somewhere between painting and sculpture and springs from a combination of form, color, and light. Herbert Hamak works with pigment and mass; he shapes and molds them into simple forms that are mostly monochromatic, such as cubes, parallelogram, and columns.

His method for creating these forms results from his expertise in mixing pigments with resin and wax. This liquid substance is molded on a conventionally constructed canvas, which provides structure for it. Even though his method mandates the perfect mastering of the medium, the artist allows serendipity every opportunity to intervene: chance causes bubbles and distortions during the drying process and the exterior conditions alter the pigment colors. Thus, nothing is ever entirely controlled in Hamak’s work; repeating the same actions would produce different results.

Starting with the 300 or so pigments present in nature, Hamak plays with both the physical properties that allow color to appear to the eye and also with the diverse aesthetic mediums that enable color to attract our eyes. Since color results from a complex chemical process, Hamak’s works focus on color as both a physical material and as a property that reflects light. Because the color is imprissoned in a translucid material, it can interact with the surrounding light. Surfaces of paintings normally relect light, but Hamak’s paintings allows light to penetrate them. Light passes through the paintings, endowing them with a vaporous aspect that belies the true weight and mass of the object.

For this new solo exhibition at the Xippas Gallery, Herbert Hamak shows a group of “paintings” that are in harmony with their environment. First they capture the light that surrounds them and then they reflect the light in order to invade the space, creating an interplay of influences. Instead of simply seeing a color, here, we feel it.

Herbert Hamak was born in 1952 in Unterfranken in Bavaria. His work has been regularly shown in numerous galeries, including Tanit Gallery in Munich (since 1990), Studio la Citta in Italy, the Tanja Rumpff Gallery in Holland, Kenji Taki in Japan, and Christopher Grimes Gallery in the United States. The Xippas Gallery displayed his work for the first time in 1991 during the exhibition The Painted Desert organized by Bob Nickas.

The Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, dedicated a solo exhibition to him in 2010. Likewise, he has had solo shows at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona in 2007 where he presented a majestic installation that directly engaged the castle’s architecture; at the Flash Art Museum in Trevi, Italy, in 2005; and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart in 1996. The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt dedicated two solo shows in 1993 and also in 1998.

His works are part of the following illustrious collections: the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main; the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany; the Technische Hocheschule in Frankfurt; the Daimler Chrysler Collection in Switzerland; the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy; and the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany.

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Dan Walsh

Since the early 1990s, Dan Walsh has developed painted artworks that etch the fragility of movement in a modernist and geometric vein. His compositions are free hand paintings that transgress the objective purity of minimalism. His paintings forms, colors, and even the manner they’re hung, are often atmospheric in nature. Situated behind an arrangement of colored stones forming curved lines and round angles, his paintings produce a sensation of floating and a strange delicateness.

These six canvases shown here rely on the elementary form of the grid. It is the structural apparatus at the heart of this group of artworks. After all, painting is the medium that allows the mechanisms of expression and perception to play off one another. Through the abstraction and the simplification of forms, each painting corresponds to a certain resonance or a table of potential elements, similar to the Tibetan Mandalas: this allows the painting to snatch the spectator’s attention and influence his reflection. For Dan Walsh, painting is a pertinent medium, “as long as it is a means for an individual to make sense of the world, and the commitment it requires is shared with the public.” Therefore the painting is not simply a critical tool. Above all else, it symbolizes the place where we can explore and question mechanisms of perception.

Primarily non-narrative, Dan Walsh’s paintings don’t forbid fictional links with what’s real, the atmosphere, personal memories, or analogies investigating the dominant effect of screens that reframe and structure our everyday vision. Above all else, they draw on the tensions present the instant our gaze touches them,a like a gentle hysteria bubbling on the surface. A very accomplished colorist, Dan Walsh explores the chromatic levels without limits, moving from a neutral grey to the combination and superposition of incredibly lyric and often surprising colors. The light texture of acrylic paint allows him to affix a gentle touch that simultaneously expresses a line and faint mark. He reveals to the spectator a double layer of meanings that balance the painstakingly slow process of reconstituting the surface and understanding the work in its totality. By displaying his canvas near the floor, Dan Walsh kindles empathy in the spectator, allowing him to feel its weight, pulse, harmonics, and tension, through the chromatic and geometric vibrations.

When faced with Dan Walsh’s paintings, the spectator’s gaze lingers on the temporal fragments of colored brushstrokes that reveal an integral, interior world of spirituality and movement.

Dan Walsh was born in 1960 in Philadelphia. He lives and works in New York. He studied at Philadelphia College of Art and Hunter College in New York.

He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. His works have been shown in numerous galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. He has had several solo shows at such institutions as the Centre d'Art Contemporain de la Synagogue de Delme (France) in 2003, the Cabinet des Estampes at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire / MAMCO in Geneva in 2002 (Switzerland), and the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2001 (USA). In 2003, he participated in the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art; and in 2006 and 2009, in the exhibition “USA Today” and “Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture” at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This year, he took part in the exhibition Whitney Biennal, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Image: Dan Walsh. Saffron 2013. Pencil and acrylic 140 x 140 cm

Galerie Xippas
rue des Sablons 6 1205 Geneva Switzerland
Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 2 pm - 7 pm
Saturday 12 pm - 5 pm
and by appointment.

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