Thomas Romhild
dal 15/10/2003 al 23/11/2003
Segnalato da
15/10/2003
Thomas Romhild
Wiebke Morgan Gallery, London
Nicholas Symes is one of our most necessary artists, one whose works embody little stabs at sympathy, at making a connection of some kind, even if the attempts are misdirected or puzzling. In the new exhibition at Wiebke Morgan we are very pleased to be showing a Symes video piece, along with his collection of sticks that dogs have chewed.
Nicholas Symes
Nicholas Symes is one of our most necessary artists, one whose works embody
little stabs at sympathy, at making a connection of some kind, even if the
attempts are misdirected or puzzling. In the new exhibition at Wiebke Morgan we are very pleased to be showing a Symes video piece, along with his collection of sticks that dogs have chewed.
Both the works are concerned with narrative, though Symes' approach to
story-telling is particularly oblique, literally so in the video, where the
impersonal physics of light reflecting on a duck pond shape the image and the
story,
fragmenting and re-assembling the aircraft passing overhead. In this way Symes
inflects his tale while absenting himself from the process. This affectless
style of intervention is carried over to Symes' presentation of his collection
of chewed sticks, poignant and pointless, a confession of the banality of the
creative act. Each stick has been part of a surrogate relationship with a
dog, but has then been taken away by the dog's owners, or thrown for the dog and
then lost. As such, each stick is the subject, and evidence, of a story of
attachment and loss, which nonetheless remains opaque to the viewer, much as do
the stories of the aircraft passengers in the video. Seeing the raw 'emotion'
etched into the sticks we are left to reflect on what kind of trace might be
left by the dramas taking place overhead.
Thomas Römhild has been one of Germany's most striking painters of landscape
for many years, and we're pleased that after two years of planning we're able
to show a selection of his recent works. A colourist with roots in Klee and
the Expressionist tradition, Römhild is primarily concerned with paint, and his
images often disintegrate into hallucinatorily intense colour fields, like
after-images left on the retina by the sun. At the same time, Römhild is an
obsessive depicter, returning again and again to the house, or its form, as
subject matter. As a result the paintings strongly suggest human presence
despite
a complete absence of the human figure, another element at work in the muted
anxiety of the canvases.
Symes studied at KIAD and Middlesex University. He is a member of the group
of artists who make up MOT and recently curated the Independence Day art event
at the Mayflower Gardens on the Thames.
Römhild is a graduate of the Hamburg Fachhochschule für Gestaltung. His work
has been exhibited in Russia as well as regularly in Germany over a period of
twenty years, and is held in a number of public and private collections.
This is his first time his paintings have been shown in the U.K.
We look forward to seeing you at the Private View or at any time during the
exhibition.
Private View: Thursday 16 October 6:30 - 9pm
Wiebke Morgan Gallery
40 Redchurch Street
London E2 7DP
t/f: 44 (0) 20 7613 5073