Frank Ahlgrimm
dal 12/6/2008 al 25/7/2008
Segnalato da
12/6/2008
Frank Ahlgrimm
Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart
In his works, words are treated as visual phenomena while other images are meant to be be read as a script. Whereas the high gloss letters in the painting Botox to go refer to our obsession with beauty, references to the barbed wire, ammunition and military insignia of the former East Bloc regimes can be deciphered in the sombre mood of the series Transit.
With „BOTOX TO GO“ the Galerie Reinhard Hauff proudly presents its
second solo show with new paintings by the Stuttgart Academy of Fine
Arts educated painter Frank Ahlgrimm (*1965), who now lives and works
in Berlin. Frank Ahlgrimm’s large emotionally and intellectually
disturbing canvasses - which are already part of numerous prestigious
collections - make an important contribution to the discussion about
the role of painting in the media age.
It is widely recognized that the overwhelming dominance of media
generated content has created an alienated (mass) consciousness that
can not critically examine the world that produced it. In the world
wide web universe, information overexposure has led to intellectual
and emotional indifference and deadened human reactions. An overdose
of diversity, stimulation and entertainment has taken the passion out
of pleasure. In his vast sensous colour abstractions, Ahlgrimm
reflects on on these conditions and anxieties in our late-capitalist
society, and also on the circumstances of the cultural collapse in the
communist bloc where he grew up.
In the works on view, words and lettering are treated as visual
phenomena, intimating but also withholding meaning, while other images
are meant to be be read as a script. Whereas the high gloss letters in
the painting “BOTOX TO GO“ from 2008 refer to our obsession with
beauty (surface), references to the barbed wire, ammunition and
military insignia of the former East Bloc regimes can be deciphered in
the sombre mood of the series „Transit“. In the environment Ahlgrimm
portrays, everything and everybody becomes flat. Except the very
surface, where Ahlgrimm applies paint with a fascination for the
expressive, tactile and sculptural range of the medium itself.
Presentation of humanity is otherwise cursory or indirect: There is no
narrative, no focus, no figural hierarchy, no perspective, no spatial
references. In the series „Transit“, the globe – our world – is like a
plastic sticker applied to the surface of the crafted canvas. With his
peculiar repertoire of disjunctive signs and symbols, cut, copied and
pasted from the depersonalized visual spaces found in video games and
computer graphics, Ahlgrimm seeks to bridge a dissociation between
anguish and control to engage with the viewer.
Opening Friday, 13.06.2008, 7 - 10 pm
Galerie Reinhard Hauff
Paulinenstr. 47, Stuttgart