Ulrich Lamsfuss — Nitidezza — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 18 → May 30, 2015

Appropriation artist Ulrich Lamsfuss presents at Galerie Templon, a new series of seemingly hyperrealist paintings on the theme of desire. Deliberately confusing painting and photography, Ulrich Lamsfuss’ work continues to call into question the very idea of originality. He works from photographs selected from an extremely wide range of sources: press, internet, sales catalogues, technical publications and art history. He then painstakingly reproduces them in oils to create a fresh interpretation of the chosen images.

Nitidezza is an Italian word that refers to a method of image-sharpening, as well as referencing the artist’s own working methods whereby a single painting can take many months to complete. His paintings are freeze-frames in a world characterised by speed, excess consumption and attention deficit disorders.

Lamsfuss offers a ‘koonsian’ vision of Jeff Koons as he focuses in on a tiny detail from one of the US artist’s works, uses an advertisement to reconcile his love of bling and Fassbinder, copies Wolfgang Tillmans and pretends to copy Juergen Teller: creating a reality that is stronger than fiction.

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Born in 1971, Ulrich Lamsfuss lives and works in Berlin. During the 1990s, he studied at the Dusseldorf academy of fine arts under Georg Baselitz. In recent years, his works have been widely exhibited, including at the Kunsthalle Hamburg in 2005, the MartA Herford in Germany (AdAbsurdum, curated by Jan Hoet) in 2008, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2013 (Painting Forever!). In France, his works have been shown as part of Viel Spass — Beaucoup de Plaisir, a 2001 exhibition at the Espace Paul Ricard (now Fondation Ricard), as well as at Galerie Templon in 2004, 2007 and 2012.