Two exhibitions
dal 28/9/2007 al 8/11/2007
Segnalato da
28/9/2007
Two exhibitions
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin
Jin Meyerson's paintings remind one of American news broadcaster's TV pictures absorbed by giants and spat out again with vehemence. The scenes in Till Gerhard's paintings might, at first sight, seem perfectly cosy but at second sight they at the latest cause discomfort.
Jin Meyerson
The Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin has the pleasure to present Jin Meyerson’s first solo exhibition in Germany in September. Meyerson, born in 1972 in South Korea and raised in the US, lives and works in New York and Paris. In recent years his works have been shown internationally at institutions and galleries, among them the Chelsea Art Museum (NY) and the Saatchi Gallery (London).
Meyerson’s paintings remind one of American news broadcaster’s TV pictures absorbed by giants and spat out again with vehemence. Glaring streaks of colour undulate on large-sized canvases and make the embodied figures look as if shredded by a psychedelic distorting mirror.
Meyerson, professing TV junkie and part of a generation of artists grown up with mass media, collects the flotsam of the daily pictorial overkill in his psyche, shakes it thoroughly and sends it back to the world outside, filtered through the cosmos of his private existence and seemingly without any assessment.
But the political dimension is already applied in the subject of the newscast pictures. Reports on natural disasters like the devastating hurricane “Katrina” in 2005, the attacks on the World Trade Center, or reports from the war in Afghanistan inevitably bestow a feeling of uneasiness on the viewer, the memory of collective helplessness and horror. The permanent cuts and abruptly interrupted narrative strands build the formal equivalent of the disturbing impression that Meyerson’s pictures leave on a deeper level.
Jin Meyerson, born in 1972 in Inchon City/ South Korea; 1997 MFA Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; solo exhibitions (extract): 2007 Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin, 2006 Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) NY, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin Paris; group exhibitions (extract): 2007 More is More – Maximalist Painting Museum of Fine Arts/ Florida State University/ Tallahasse Vanhaerents Foundation Torhout, The New Authentics Spertus Museum Chicago, 2006 The Triumph of Painting The Saatchi Gallery London, 2004 Surface Tension Chelsea Art Museum NY.
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Michael Janssen
After his solo exhibition in 2006 in the gallery’s showrooms in Cologne, the Galerie Michael Janssen now has the pleasure to present Till Gerhard’s second solo exhibition in Berlin.
Gerhard, born in 1971 in Hamburg, where he now lives and works, among others took part in exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg) and at Saatchi Gallery (London).
The scenes in Till Gerhard’s paintings might, at first sight, seem perfectly cosy but at second sight they at the latest cause discomfort. Ostensible unoffending photo templates of young people on festivals in front of moody sunsets are turned through painterly transformation into something sinister and threatening, with deformed faces, dark and threatening skies and spookily levitating shining entities.
With loose painterly gestures in lucid neon-colour hues and by means of impalpable shifts and inserting mysterious, inexplicable aspects that seem to be visible on canvas only for a couple of seconds only to disappear the next moment, Gerhard turns the icons of a hippie-contemplativeness from the sixties up to the present time into weirdness.
The channelling of such frightening elements in everyday situations -or rather vice versa, the discovery of weirdness in familiar surroundings- does not serve Gerhard as stylistic device for a gothic fictitious movie but documents his doubts on the innocence of the very real times of his childhood, which in retrospection and on photos seems unnaturally safe and sound.
Till Gerhard, born in 1971 in Hamburg; 1998 Graduate School for Applied Sciences / Faculty of Design Hamburg; solo exhibitions (extract): 2006 Galerie Michael Janssen Köln, Stellan Holm Gallery NY, 2005 Galleri K Oslo; group exhibitions (extract): 2007 Seestücke Kunsthalle Hamburg, The Triumph of Painting The Saatchi Gallery London, 2005 security check Arndt&Partner Zürich.
Image: Jin Meyerson, The simultaneous appearance / disappearance of 581 prophets | 2007 | Oil, acrylic, ink and encaustic on linen | 472 x 290 cm
Opening on Saturday, September 29, 2007, 7 – 9pm
Galerie Michael Janssen
Kochstr. 60, 10696 Berlin
Hours: Tue - Fri 10 - 6pm, Sat 11 - 6pm