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17/11/2011

Philip Akkerman / Albrecht Schnider

Galerie Bob van Orsouw (old location), Zurich

Philip Akkerman
Lost and Ambulous

The Dutch painter Philip Akkerman encloses himself in a fascinating aura. Since the end of his art studies, Akkerman (born 1957), with few exceptions, has exclusively painted himself. And ever since, thousands of self-portraits have ensued. His own image he has, along the way, transformed—via various costumes, age situations, and different modifications to his physiognomy. Beyond these variations, he also alludes to the formal style of movements like Expressionism, Abstraction or Surrealism.
His portraits take us on a stroll through art history. In many aspects, the remarkable tenacity with which Akkerman spurs on his artistic labours also provides stimulus for a debate on painting.

On the one hand, with his obstinacy he expounds what painting means to him—perhaps in general as well: namely a self-defined convention. To the artist, the presence of pictures, their presence in a room, represents an existential metaphor. Parallels can be drawn to icon painting, which grants the portrayed a presence. The theme of Akkerman’s work is interesting from another aspect. At the center of portrait painting the question remains as to how personal identity is to be construed.

Especially in these times of digital image production, this question needs re-stating. Schooled poses and behavioural patterns are inscribed in our world of images as any glance at the global picture galleries on the Internet, Flickr or Facebook shows. Akkerman’s intense occupation with man’s image, which he reduces to his own person, is thus anything but anachronistic.

Galerie Bob van Orsouw is pleased to present a select work group of Philip Akkerman’s in the exhibition “Lost and Ambulous”. These works have never before been shown in such highly charged compactness and intensity. Instead of working out the portrait’s facial features in all their details, the artist magnifies their pictorial impact by partially painting over them. The brush applications are, in part, easily recognizable; the paint is sometimes applied impasto. As always, Akkerman’s eyes in the portrait are fastened on his opposite number. The direct face-to-face contact between the viewer and the portrayed artist, which is tangible behind the paint daubs and overpainting of the eyes, is intriguing. You can easily get lost in the almost hypnotic play between the gazes.

This loss of control is quite deliberate. In his exhibition title the painter speaks of “lost”, which implies the intimate moment when the two are absorbed in exchanging looks. On the other hand, the title hints at a playful ingredient with its use of the word “ambulous”. As the artist himself says: “’Ambulous’ has no meaning. It is something like a painting or a piece of music, meaning nothing, but existing because someone created it (me).” With this existential postulation, Akkerman highlights for us his artistic procedure of investigating one and the same motif in all its incisiveness and most manifold facets.

Stefan Wagner
From the German by Jeanne Haunschild

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Albrecht Schnider
Wieder Finden

When is a picture plane open or closed? When does it offer you room for imagining fullness and vacancy, formulation and happenstance that we define as a picture or as ‘pictureness’? Albert Schnider (*1958 in Lucerne) pursues these fundamental questions in his paintings and drawings and formulates—besides the abstraction of the possible and the manifold—also the longing he/we have for the pictorial.

In the beginning is the drawing, which in many respects is essential to Albrecht Schnider, for the fragile form drawn by hand produces lines and planes that configure the constructive basis for the (future) painting. In the drawing, moreover, the intent behind the precise, the volitional, the incalculable, the happenstance and, finally, what diverges from the determined design, comes together in a very direct way. Even if Albrecht Schnider’s geometric motifs seem in their form to be exactly calculated, they proceed from an intuitive quest. In his decision-making process, Schnider weighs the different possibilities of graphically drawn figurations until, between the single planes and lines, the (for the artist) sole possible formal figuration gets defined. Based on the result, Schnider specifies which portions of the plane are provided with which colour values and which left blank. In this artistic process, the undefined and the definable stand together and make one thing above all explicit: namely, the antithetical longing to want to achieve what is unachievable—because neither homogeneity nor multiplicity can exist as a whole.

This thought can be retraced in a closer inspection of the painting. The sheared-off geometric motifs are imaginable as figurations and fragments of a lost-sight-of whole. The fields provided with a colour value or left blank are planes and volumes, depths and vacancies. The geometric motifs are three-dimensional figures or splintered planes in space. The metal colours are ephemeral reflecting screens for the light and stand vis-à-vis the definition of black and white. In this double-entendre of visual and mental interplay we as viewers implement the construction of a now possible, realised picture. For each reality of the pictorial that Albrecht Schnider seeks in his painted formulations and, in the end, encompasses, takes place when the viewer, by means of the defined and the undefined and what is on hand, thinks of what is missing. It is in this antithesis that the available construction and the absence of the pictorial come together to a reality in realisation.

At Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Albrecht Schnider is showing his current paintings of geometric motifs. The exhibition includes small-scale and two very large-scale formats. In Schnider’s many-faceted paintings, drawings and object-oriented works, the formulation with geometric figurations is aligned with the thematic contents of his other subjects.
Birgit Szepanski
From the German by Jeanne Haunschild

Image: Philip Akkerman, Self-Portrait No. 125, 2010 Oil on wooden panel, 40 x 34 cm

Opening: Friday, 18 November 2011, 6 – 8 pm

galerie bob van orsouw
Albisriederstrasse 199a - Zurich
Opening hours:
tue-wed-fri 12­-6 pm, thu 12­-8 pm, sat 11-5 pm
or by appointment
Free admission

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