Identités plurielles — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 4 → July 30, 2016

The Galerie Karsten Greve presents Identités plurielles, an exhibition grouping the work of nine artists through a series of thirty works, drawings, photographs, sculptures, engravings and paintings. They all have in common the search to overcome the processes, materials and traditional elements of composition by developing a clean, perfectly identifiable aesthetic language. Witness the photograms of Adam Fuss, the multitude of focus effects in the works of Thomas Brummett or the illusionist processes inherent in the works of Raul Illarramendi and Manish May.

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Pierrette Bloch
Throughout her artistic career, Pierrette Bloch (1928) has remained faithful to simple materials and patterns. She has created her own language from collages, India ink on paper, hardboard plates, rope and horse hair. Formal, minimalist, but nuanced, her work is based on points, lines and strokes. The artist explores the boundary between drawing and sculpture as it constantly reformulates the interval, the relationship between the empty and the full. But the spontaneous gesture of the artist remains the foundation for everything, always stemming from new series and experiments on materials.
Time has stopped in the works of the American artist photographer Thomas Brummett. Like a regard plunging into the essence of beauty, his works bow in great reverence before the perfection of nature. So holding it in sight, he seems to defy for eternity an oft destructive human civilization. With Thomas Brummett, this search for ‘eternal life’ does not limit itself to reason: the material used in the creation process must meet maximum durability requirements and technical perfection.

Tony Cragg (1949) works with the most diverse materials such as wood, stone, glass and iron. His most recent works have abstract and organic forms; an accumulation of strata and scrolls. Each change in material is a new reflection on formal and expressive possibilities.

Adam Fuss (1961) is known for his enigmatic compositions obtained through the technique of the photogram, by placing objects on photosensitive materials and diverting the traditional use of the camera technique popularized by the Surrealists. Fuss includes evocative imagery in his work, ranging from floral compositions to natural patterns, abstract spirals, or drops of water, and his photographs are often shrouded in light and of an ethereal character.

Raúl Illaramendi
The work of Raúl Illaramendi (1982) proceeds from the observation of ‘traces left by man’ in the milieu of daily urban life. The artist brings them to light and photographs their unique compositions on facades, sidewalks or doors, constituting in this way a repertoire of images upon which he draws to create his works. For the Diamond series, he was inspired by the chequered tile patterns of his workshop, meticulously reproduced on paper in graphite.

Robert Mangold (1937) focuses on the visual possibilities of the coloured structure and on the relationships of the line with a flat surface and thereby to the nature of the fragment relative to the whole. His vocabulary, largely borrowed from the history of painting, consists of coloured surfaces, lines and frames of various sizes and often irregular formats. His compositions are based on the ratio between the line, the surface and the support described by inexact, paradoxical geometric figures, which require a certain effort in reading.

Manish Nai
Intrigued by the illusionist potential of painting, Manish Nai (1980) began to study the possibilities offered by the forms of Op Art in letting appear in his drawings sections made of reliefs and depressions, in works that are actually perfectly flat. By exploring the effects of trompe l’oeil, his pictorial practice tends, in its three-dimensional rendering, to be closer to his work as a sculptor.

Detlef Orlopp (1937) works with the known in his photographs. He does not count on original stagings, but features a familiar topic; the landscape. And yet they are landscapes that do not invite the gaze to wander into the distance but rather to sense the attraction of proximity. Orlopp does not show any landscape view or any study of nature in detail, such as flowers, rocks or grass in his photographs. He is primarily interested in the structural data that encounter one another in their linearity and flatness.