For the exhibition the artist presents new paintings.Collages of pornographic materials encountered total abstraction, while crazy paint orgies and aggressive symbols mixed with text fragments on huge canvases.
Galerie Michael Janssen is pleased to present Donkey
Embrace, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Emil Holmer.
Machos and girls, there are fixed roles for both in the world of
painting: the one makes large paintings for which the other sits
as a model. When the art tends more towards abstraction, the
latter can also simply just hang out at the studio. Emil Holmer’s
paintings so far seemed to fulfill this cliché precisely.
Courtesy Michael Janssen Berlin-Singapore
Collages of pornographic materials encountered total
abstraction, while crazy paint orgies and aggressive symbols
mixed with text fragments on huge canvases. Just before
this kind of dialectic mimicry consumes itself and loses itself
in a kind of grotesque exaggerated aestheticization, Holmes
reminds us in his new works of the beginnings of his anti-aesthetic attitude. This was first and foremost an expression
of protest and resistance against dominant formalisms. Speaking in Hegelian terms, their tendency towards the negative
revealed a kind of continuous dark side of modernism. This is precisely where Holmer starts, because he knows that a
continuous breach of taboos is merely tiring and by no means a subversive category for a different approach to works of
art.
Even though every attempt to bring order to his collapsing visual worlds is still in vain, nowadays harsh painterly gestures
meet fragments of advertisements and meandering silkscreen prints that exude an appealing retro chic. The formats
actually have not become smaller, but the apotheosis of the ostensibly repulsive or at least confusing has reached its
obvious end. A look at Pawn I and II, which were at the beginning of this new series, reveals that Holmer remains
convinced that a new formulation of the notion of a picture on the basis of intensity, pain, and love is still possible; that
he can be radical in terms of content and at the same time make pop art—large, colorful things that have an immediate
appeal. At the same time we can see in the painting Wrong Forest how subliminally the boundaries in the attribution and
reproduction of gender relations in Holmer’s art have for quite a while now become fluid.
Emil Holmer (b. 1975 in Karlstad, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. Holmer's solo exhibitions have been at the Prinz Georg Raum für
Kunst, Berlin (2014), Galleri SE, Sweden (2014), Rättvik Konsthall, Sweden (2013), the Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden (2012), Galleri 21,
Sweden (2011), Galleri Thomassen, Sweden (2011) Art Museum of Gotland, Sweden (2011), Michael Jannsen, Berlin (2010).
Recent group exhibitions include Animal re-structure, Prinz Georg/Raum für Kunst, Berlin (2013), Unknown (Paintings) . Galerie Michael
Janssen, Berlin (2012), Paper does not blush, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin (2012), Fear!Fear?, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway
(2011), Magma, Autocenter, Berlin (2011), Picnic, Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, Sweden (2011).
Image: Emil Holmer, Hum to the Dim Giant, 2014
Press Contact:
Nina Borgmann, n.borgmann@galeriemichaeljanssen.de
Opening: Friday, March 20, 2015, 6 - 9 pm
Michael Janssen Berlin
Potsdamer Str. 63
Tue - Sat 11am to 6pm