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19/11/2009

Ulrich Lamsfuss

Lombard Freid Projects, New York

"What I see is what you get," says Ulrich Lamsfuss. In our age of Twitter, Second Life, instant messaging, and Skype even the hyper-real looks like fiction. Based in Berlin, Lamsfuss belongs to a successful generation of artists who are determined to transform perceptions about the images with which we are inundated from the media, magazines, the Internet and video. What is lost in the speedy bombardment that has become our visual culture, Lamsfuss reclaims through painting.

Birdie, Lamfuss’ third solo exhibition at Lombard-Freid Projects, presents a new body of oil paintings that carefully reinterpret images borrowed from a wide range of photographic material, often replicated several times over so as to render the subject both further removed from the source and at the same time, closer to its essence. With the Pop kitsch, ironic repetition and banality of subject matter reminiscent of Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, along with a philosophical affinity for Jean Baudrillard (simulacra and simulation), Lamsfuss explores principles of authorship, reproduction and the contemporary erosion between reality and representation.

The artist is quoted, "I am drowning in fiction: man-made mass production of images, meaning, information, art. I’m suffering from a lack of reality but I am longing for one. I think real reality is exotic and rare. The confusion makes me want to see." Stockfood, a painting in the exhibition of an image bought via an Internet food photo agency, refers to classic still lives, while pointing to the sources responsible for blurring the line between goods that are needed and goods for which a need is created by commercial images.

While his meticulous precision and technique may appear classical, Lamsfuss’ work resists categorization and marks a purposeful departure from past traditions of realist painting. His work uses the illusionistic devices of realism, paying close attention to surface and perspective, yet operates on a conceptual level as an inquiry into the ways in which images and symbols have replaced reality and meaning. "Watching is more true than knowing. This is the irony of indifference and brings back the aura into an empty world."

The seeming randomness of subject matters is deceptive, as the selection is born from an almost compulsive collection of images to which Lamfuss has a personal relationship and that together present a surprisingly unified description of contemporary culture- a Tiffany vase, a Chinese laborer in a rural landscape, a cross section of a Mercedes Benz, a portrait of actor Michael Douglas. In complement to the paintings are works on paper in ink, watercolor or pencil, which re-imagine images of famous figures running the spectrum from Claudia Schiffer to Claude Levi-Strauss, Arnold Schwarzenegger to Alfred Hitchcock.

Opening reception: Friday, November 20, 6-8pm

Lombard-Freid Projects
531 West 26th Street, New York NY 10001
Hours:
Tuesday through Friday 10–6; Saturday 11–6

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