Far from us: Various Artists
The Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents the group exhibition FAR FROM US, featuring new work by Carla Klein, Michael Raedecker, Dirk Skreber and Robert Suermondt.
The Dutch artist Carla Klein (1970), who lives and works in London and Rotterdam, paints the most unlikely subjects with bravado. Water in a swimming pool, the window of a showcase in a museum, the plastic surface of a bowling alley and the reflection of a flash bulb in a television screen. In her paintings the perception of the viewer is multiplied and reflected until it disappears into a far distance where nothing is visible anymore.
The images of the Dutch artist Michael Raedecker (1963), the winner of the 1999 John Moores Award and recently nominated for the Turner Prize, are built out of paint and threads. Subject matter is not of supreme importance in his work, the emphasis is on atmosphere and state of mind rather than reality. Raedecker plays with angles like a film director and chooses unusual perspectives. Sometimes there is a bird's-eye-view from above, at other times things are seen through the eyes of a spectator looking up at the sky, lying on his back.
The images of the German painter Dirk Skreber (1961), the recent recipient of the Berliner Nationalgalerie Award, have an ominous quality. The subject matter of his paintings appears to be neutral: trains, cars, buildings and playing fields. The paint is applied loosely and with virtuosity and he uses a variety of industrial materials like insulating tape to create backgrounds and add highlights here and there. Skreber is a master at evoking a kind of subdued tension, the tension which precedes the action in a movie or lingers after the actors have disappeared from view.
The Swiss filmmaker and painter Robert Suermondt (1961) is fascinated by the way images are constructed and the manner in which the spectator is preconditioned by the way he or she looks at things. His colourful paintings resemble a labyrinth of constructed spaces, elusive and evanescent. One fading into the other, seemingly going on and on into infinity.
