Alan Michael
dal 26/1/2011 al 17/3/2011
Segnalato da
26/1/2011
Alan Michael
Siakos.Hanappe House of Art, Athens
In the work of Alan Michael individual paintings combine to describe the artist's attitude toward the representation of the contemporary world. Paintings of cars, repeated texts and ad campaigns form the basic vocabulary of this body of work, alluding to a conflict between anti-intellectual photorealism and the analytical consciousness of pop art.
In the work of Alan Michael individual paintings combine to describe the artist's
attitude toward the representation of the contemporary world. Paintings of cars,
repeated texts and ad campaigns form the basic vocabulary of this body of work,
alluding to a conflict between anti-intellectual photorealism and the analytical
consciousness of pop art. The relative dislocation between these formats represents
an avoidance of combined image with text in favour of a focus on discreet separated
elements and competing styles.
The special status of an artist's reference material is brought into question by a
focus on mainstream imagery: J. Mays' VW Beetle, the logo of Domus Magazine, details
of ad campaigns for Vitamin Water. Neither kitsch or marginal, or obviously symbolic
of dense enquiry - the subtext is the circulation of such special material. Its
absence within these artworks positions the artist as either being completely
outside such circuits or as a critic of this familiar exchange, fixated on a
phenomena and representing its negative. This formula for representation - a
fixation with superficial resemblance - is reflected in the exhibition's title, a
reference to a counterfeit Harry Potter novel circulated in the early 2000's.
Individual paintings show structures and traces of previous works by the artist:
those based on ads for Vitamin Water act as 'lookalikes' for earlier paintings of
glass bottles with texts, and use the vocabulary of development with changes in
colour scheme, font and technique. Text paintings with repeated words and phrases
join a series of works featuring repeat imagery (shoes, portraits or texts) and also
follow the basic format of corporate event branding boards. In his paintings of
cars, Michael makes use of pictorial models from the era of photorealism, depicting
shining reflective surfaces and shifts of focus in unpopulated cityscapes. The
subject of these works is the VW Beetle of 1998 - 2011. Like the BMW Mini (the focus
of earlier paintings) the Beetle an exemplar of silhouette retro design where
classic shapes from the modernist era are revisited with technological updates.
Opening Thursday, 27 January, h 20, in the presence of the artist
Siakos.Hanappe
16 Maragou Street, 16675, Glyfada, Athens, Greece
Hours: Tue-Fri 12-20, Sat 12-16
Free admission