The Abstract Cabinet

Galería Eduardo Secci

Florence – Italy, June 271 – September 7, 2019

Curated by Friederike Nymphius Dates

Eduardo Secci Contemporary is pleased to present the exhibition The Abstract Cabinet curated by Friederike Nymphius.

The show will feature works by a group of international artists coming from different artistic as well as cultural backgrounds. Although working with different media, they share an interest in abstract principles, interpreted and employed individually by each artist. The character of the concept is accentuated by the formally reduced formal aspect of the works, by the use of few colors like black, white, grey, silver contrasted with bright pink and blue. The artists mix an abstract vocabulary with a strong consciousness for the presence thus emphasizing the specific aesthetics of the show.

As the rest of his sculptures, Aldo Chaparro’s Totems(Lima, 1965,lives and works in Mexico City, New York and Lima)aren’t trying to create the illusion of reality. He has abandoned true to life perspective, working with artificial space relations that makes us think not into reality, but into its essence. This act allows us to the idle space and moment of creation, inwhichyouget to know yourself until you construct yourself. Caro Jost (Munich 1965, lives and works in Munich and New York) based her research on the reproduction and documentation of time, space and events and placing them in a current, contemporary context. She started her long-term project Streetprintsin New York: using a special, self-developed technique to capture traces of the past, Jost takes real imprints of street and sidewalk surfaces on canvas from so far over 80 cities worldwide. “Streets and sidewalks are the purest reflections of our human way of life”, she once declared. Beth Letain (California, 1976, lives and works in Berlin) works on monumentally scaled paintings, adamantly, absurdly honest about what they are: brightly colored stripes, squares, stacks, and slabs suspended across impossibly weightless white grounds. These are lively and quotidian forms, easily named but stubbornly resistant to description. In their simplicity, their unassuming thematic variations, these works hold up a mirror to painting’s modernist past.Gerold Miller(Altshausen, 1961, lives and works in Berlin) hasalwayspursued a radical and elegant strategy in which he exits the picture without actually leaving it. The Monoforms are the furthest reaching development in this direction, for they stretch the traditional format of the ‘picture’ to the extreme. The actual process of arriving at the image has to be done by the viewer. By pointing to the wall as the ultimate ground, and dispensing with colorand form as theonlymeans, Miller revokesthe boundaries of abstract painting and minimalist sculpture, andpushes these categories into the realm of the conceptual. Michael Staniak(1982, Melbournewhere he currently lives and works) creates the paintings mostly by hand -he builds up texture with uneven layers of plaster and then paints the surface in a range of ways -his paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to flat digital prints.Indeed, one must viewthe works up close to perceive any texture or depth, and as such, they behave like contemporary trompe l’oeil paintings that baffle the senses. The works of Katja Strunz(1970, Ottweiler, lives and works in Berlin)bear the traces of lived experience, of a past that manifests itself through the use of recycled materials. Her sculptural practice, seeped in history, finds its roots in the constructivists and avant-gardes. While elegant in their construction, the sculptures also retain a handmade aspect, revealing their aging over time. The influences of Blair Thurman(1961, New Orleans, lives and works in New York)range from Pop art and Minimalism to relics from childhood, popular music, and 1970s cinemas. His standardized forms, pulled from slot-car racetracks, architectural frameworks, and found shapes from daily life, comprise a personal iconography; the fascinations of boyhood working to render the subliminal realm of abstract geometries more idiosyncratic and accessible. The industrial printer isthe most natural artistic medium for Thomas Wachholz(1984, Cologne, where he lives and works): from the very beginning he has been experimenting with its technical capabilities, testing the limits of what is feasible.The composition of the image which normally marks the unremovable beginning of graphic design, is shifted to the end and claims herewith a newpositioning for graphic design. Wachholz’ investigation on the limits of painting generates an art of opposites: machine versus manual, fullness versus void, color versus non-color.

Lengua Barbara

Galería Casado Santapau

Madrid – Spain, January 31 – March 3, 2019