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6/3/2006

Christoph Schmidberger

Goff + Rosenthal, New York

You Are Forgiven

Goff + Rosenthal is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in New York of Austrian-born Christoph Schmidberger. "You Are Forgiven" comprises three large-scale paintings and six drawings made within the last year in Schmidberger's Los Angeles studio.

Those familiar with Schmidberger's work will recognize familiar themes--decadent and disinterested youth, an overcharged sexuality that is both languid and transgressive, and the implication of a larger narrative of desire that is always just out of reach. Critics have found art-historical antecedents for Schmidberger's painting in the Renaissance (the haughtily bored and beautiful gaze of a Bronzino), the Pre-Raphaelites, and David Hockney. The paintings and drawings in "You Are Forgiven" are more complex and ambitious than anything Schmidberger has attempted before. The three large-scale paintings seem to amplify the complex psychology of Schmidberger's earlier, typically smaller works exponentially. New York-based writer and critic Joao Ribas describes the painting, also titled "You Are Forgiven" as follows: A kind of post-coital, reverse pieta, the image stands as an illustration of that oft-remarked confluence of the two basic psychic forces, Eros and Thanatos, captured in the euphemism of the petit mort . The luminosity of the flesh in the painting--also a fixture of most of Schmidberger's work---is thus both carnal and morbid. This is the same slippage between ecstasy and death that is seen in Schmidberger's paintings of bodies floating in swimming pools. Sex, death, beauty and the (mostly empty) promise of youth suffuse Schmidberger's work and are amplified by his prodigious technical skills. And, as Ribas points out, "Schmidberger suggests that the banal or quotidian is itself erotically charged ... a kind of fulfillment of the Freudian premise that everything is in fact a potential target of libidinal investment."

Christoph Schmidberger's work will be featured in the Saatchi Collection's Triumph of Painting exhibition in London in 2007. His work is also in numerous public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Frederic R. Weisman Collection at Pepperdine University in Malibu, the Albertina and Oesterreichische Galerie Belvedere, both in Vienna, and numerous important private collections.

Goff + Rosenthal
537B West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011

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