René Wirths — La vie — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → April 24, 2010

After the success of his still lifes show last year, the young Berlin-based artist René Wirths returns to the Impasse Beaubourg with a new project that examines lives. Butterflies, portraits, children’s drawings and other symbols of the frailty of existence are all executed in stark profile with an uncanny level of realism.
Fascinated by questions of perception and representation, for the past several years René Wirths has developed a meticulous painting technique with works rigorously composed and set against a white background. He ‘poses’ his ‘subjects’ under natural light in his studio and then reproduces exactly what he perceives, without preconceptions regarding trueness to life and realism. It is a technique that forces the viewer into a head-on confrontation with the subject.
Lying somewhere between conceptual art and hyperrealism, his works reveal the flaws in our perception and indirectly explore the artist’s perplexity with the world. A seemingly scrappy children’s drawing, an open palm, a moth, an outsized loaf of bread: an unexpected succession of subjects that, when viewed as a whole, imperceptibly reveals a form of self-portrait.

Born in 1967, René Wirths stands out from other German artists by virtue of his figurative painting style, closer to conceptual art than to traditional painting. He has shown his work at many galleries, including the Michael Haas gallery in Berlin, the 2000 Geneva Biennale and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Otterndorf, Germany. In 2010, the Kunsthal Rotterdam will be organizing a large show devoted to his work.