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18/11/2004

Lori Hersberger

Galerie Bob van Orsouw (old location), Zurich

“Russian Roulette”

Subsequent to his exhibit “Made in Hong Kong” (2002), Lori Hersberger (*1964) is now launching a second presentation in our gallery rooms. “Russian Roulette” follows in the wake of his solo show in Kunsthaus Zurich (2003) and takes the latter’s mise-en-scène of synthetic sculptures and acoustic elements a step further.

From the beginning Lori Hersberger’s artistic genesis has been characterized by his undaunted experimentation with painting, video, installation, sculpture and music. This not only focuses on cross-pollinating strategies, but also levels the playing field of genre-specific hierarchies and materials. In his attempt to expand the concept of painting, Lori Hersberger brings different media, categories and genres into quasi ‘intertextual’ relationship with each other. Too, starting out with a white-primed canvas or acrylic mirror as image support, he uses different painting and spray techniques to affect a three-dimensional experience.

Even when they are not implemented on site, Lori Hersberger’s artistic postulations always have in mind their relation to their surroundings. Our physical experience of the painting’s integration in its situation is the consequence of a strict methodology by which the artist inquires into the historical and theoretical implications of his medium. And yet, through their form and color, the single works radiate an almost cheeky lightheartedness. They testify to the lightness of a gesture that replaces a search for ideologies with sampling and dogmatism with crossover. For example, in earlier installations the artist had canvases in fluorescent paint compete with luminescent neon tubes, used mirror shards to double and triple his mural paintings or set up the moving picture of a video film so as to complement the paint dripping across the surface of a wall.

Despite all these methods for overstepping borderlines, Lori Hersberger keeps sight of the, to him, fundamental agenda of painting. While his sentence fragments written in neon are thrown on the wall like suggestive adverts or his video films follow a well-known narrative structure, his painting frees itself of any figurative compulsion. Even the artificial hues of his paint have no symbolic or thematic function. The mirrors that Lori Hersberger will also set up in the present exhibit are meant to drive painting’s representative function to an absurd end. It is no longer the picture that reflects the world, but the mirror on the floor that reflects, multiplies and estranges the picture. Beyond this, the mirrors function, in interaction with the synthetic sculptures, as architectural elements that surmount the boundaries of the room or suspend it in an endless continuum.

Birgid Uccia

20 November 2004 ­ 15 January 2005

Vernissage: Friday, 19 November 2004 from 6 to 8 pm

Galerie Bob Van Orsouw
Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zurich Switzerland
Opening hours:
Th, Fr 12:00-18:00 Sa 11:00-16:00

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