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22/1/2003

G-Brecht

Houldsworth Gallery, London

Zone 39

Houldsworth is pleased to exhibit new work by the Dutch painter, G-Brecht. In his disquieting landscapes, technical innovations interact uneasily with nature: a single monitor glows underneath heavy sylvan foliage, neon strip lights are suspended from a canopy of tall trees, and a plane flies through a swampy mangrove.

These are contemporary landscapes, yet in paintings such as Zone and Bunker, they nod to a Romantic Ideal exemplified in the genre's past. The Ideal, once silent and still and devoid of human presence, is replaced by something more menacing and mysterious; the overall effect is reminiscent of the desolation of Andrei Tarkovsky's films. Stage lighting rigs and concrete walls - constructions that are vestiges from G-Brecht's experience as a theatre set designer - are integral to many of his paintings and signify our continual interaction, or interference, with the environment. In Frontier, for instance, the landscape burns ferociously in intense yellow and crimson flames, but inexplicably the fire can be watched from a safe, almost clinical, distance, behind a glass window in a control room. Monitors are installed above, to survey the scene from multiple angles or replay moments of interest.

Fictitious and unsettling, uninhabitable and agriculturally unfeasible, these landscapes, or Zones as coined by the artist, feel like a controlled experiment set up within the closed confines of a science laboratory. But just as formulas, medicines and new technologies are discovered in a lab, so too are there solutions to the riddles depicted within these images. Wanting to divert the viewer from any readings that are too obvious or literal, G-Brecht provides only the sparsest of clues to events occurring within the painting. G-Brecht's Zones are suggestive, hypothetical and theatrical, staged from the perspective of a window, or more aptly a television set, so that the viewer is compelled to look and interpret the scene and effectively complete the image.

G-Brecht recently completed his MA degree at Goldsmiths University, following his study at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. G-Brecht's work is in numerous public and private collections, including Sterling Commerce, Océ-van der Grinten, De Telegraaf and BNG Bank, Netherlands. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, the US and London. This is his first exhibition at Houldsworth.

Image: Zone 2001, Oil on linen 142 x 193 cm,56 x 76 in

For additional information or images, please contact Mariska Nietzman.

opening times Monday-Friday, 10.00-5.30; Saturday, 10.30-1.00

Houldsworth Gallery
33-34 Cork Street
London

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