Jannis Varelas Galerie Krinzinger
Jannis Varelas, The Giant, 2019, Galerie Krinzinger
Born in Athens, Greece in 1977, She lives and works in Athens, Vienna and Los Angeles. Jannis Varelas unveils the surprising side of banal elements in everyday life. Playfully fusing abstraction and realistic representation, his paintings explore lived spaces through a myriad of collage-like details. He constructs the reality from fragments: like in archeological excavations, lived moments are presented to us in a seemingly arbitrary composition of random traces. We are shown a lighter lying on a packet of cigarettes, a small stained cloth resembling the head of a mythical creature, food leftovers shaped like a happy face: when seen from a specific perspective, these insignificant remnants suggest a different reality that can open up to a new dimension, full of possibilities.
The signs and symbols in Varelas’ work resemble automatic painting or children’s drawings, with added dynamism deriving from the artist’s highly physical, expressive technique. His work reflects on social issues and the plight of humanity in world history, but the thematic content is expressed in a web of subtle allusions that spontaneously follow the artist’s irrational trains of thought. Varelas’ work has been exhibited widely around the world at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, London’s Saatchi Gallery, and the Kunsthalle Wien.
Riccardo Baruzzi P420
Riccardo Baruzzi, 3888 sabato mattina di luce artificiale, 2020, P420
Flowers, pornography, madonnas, tackles, horses, divinities, abaci all encounter their semantic and pictorial sublimation in a universe of semi-transparent canvases, invented brushes, pencils five meters long, perfect cacophonies and deceptive euphonies, boxes that tremble, turntables and cooling fans that rotate to generate polyrhythms in the widest range of timbres. The research of Riccardo Baruzzi is structured around the physical and poetic principles of drawing and sound. Rhythm and the movement of drawn strokes, the resilience of a surface, the pain in a muscle, the sound and sign produced by the falling of a body: every element that connects the limbs and the tools of the artist to the canvas or the paper has a value in Riccardo Baruzzi’s work.
The artist born in Lugo in 1976 paints drawings and draws paintings to reveal the origin of images, tracing back to the essence as signs. In this operation of analysis and subsequent synthesis of the hidden structure of things, at times Riccardo Baruzzi involves the human element: the artist’s performance works call for the participation of art students, collectors, gallerists, assigned a role of interaction with the display of the painting or the very moment of its creation.
Laure Prouvost Carlier Gebauer
Laure Prouvost, metal woman – Hiding, 2019, carlier | gebauer
The Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost is known for her lush, immersive films and mixed-media installations. Interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images, and meaning, she has said that in her works “fiction and reality get really tangled.” At once seductive and jarring, her films are composed of a rich, almost tactile assortment of pictures, sounds, and spoken and written phrases, which appear and disappear in quick, flashing cuts. These are often shown nestled into installations filled with a dizzying assortment of found objects, sculptures, paintings, drawings, furniture, signs, and architectural assemblages, based on the themes and imagery in her films. Prouvost does not allow for passive viewing. Through her work, she often addresses viewers directly, pulling them into her unruly, imaginative visions.
Eammon Doyle Michael Hoppen Gallery
Eamonn Doyle, K38, 2018, Michael Hoppen Gallery
Born in Dublin in 1969, Eamonn Doyle graduated with a Diploma in Photography from IADT in 1991. He spent much of the next twenty years producing music and working in the independent music business, founding the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) alongside the record labels D1 Recordings and Dead Elvis. Doyle returned to photography in 2008. Most of Doyle’s work is produced in and around the Dublin city centre where he has lived for the past 20 years, and these images prove that some of the best photographs can be taken on your very own doorstep. This particular study is a series of beautifully cropped portraits of individuals as they go about their daily lives.
Most of them are elderly which imbues the images with a strong sense of the transience of our existence. Doyle manages to endow the images with an eerie purity, for they are void of the litter and urban furniture that is usually so common in street photography. Martin Parr has described i as ‘the best street photo book in a decade’. Indeed, the series is reminiscent of some of the greats, such as Walker Evans’ Subway photographs of the late 1940s, Harry Callahan’s Chicago series of the 50s, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Streetwork of the 90s. The pictures possess all the mystery, candour and what Walker Evans described as “naked repose” of timeless street photography.
“I started photographing in and around Dublin city centre in the late 1980s, but I took something of a hiatus from photography in the late 1990s in order to concentrate on music. Returning to photography in recent years, I set out to work with what I knew. As a long-term resident of Parnell Street in Dublin’s north inner city, there was a wealth of photographic subjects on my doorstep. It’s an old working class area, now quite multicultural. At times it’s edgy and raw and vibrant, while at others, it seems half-sunk in a weary pathos. This set of photographs came about over a long reflective period in which I was re-reading Beckett. While photographing, I began to strip away as much of the context and background from the subjects as I could. The subjects are all shot at close range, but respectfully, perhaps even reverently. The pictures show only fragments of possible narratives, but for me, every life has weight and drama, even if its meaning is ultimately elusive.”
Natalie Czech Kadel Willborn
Natalie Czech, Kool Kiss / Cigarette Ends, 2019, Kadel Willborn
Natalie Czech’s conceptual photography brings together existing images and texts and places them in a new dialogue with each other. By subtly adapting aspects of Pop and Conceptual Art, she engages in a tongue-in-cheek play with the “power of images” and the “meaning between the lines”. Natalie Czech’s series “Poet’s Questions” and “Poems by Repetition”, gauge the potentiality of pictorial and linguistic signs. Through markings in the text and image, a hidden, mundane poetry is “literally” and “pictorially” made visible and readable.
Natalie Czech’s work has become well-known through international solo shows and museum collections. Her works are included in museum collections such as those of the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Museum of Modern Art New York or the Collection of The Federal Estate of Germany. Solo exhibitions have taken place at among others, the CRAC d’Alsace (2016), Palais de Tokyo Paris (2014), Kunstverein Hamburg (2013) or Ludlow 38 New York (2012). Her pieces have been on view in numerous exhibitions including “Next Generation”, Museum Leverkusen (2019), “Situation/Foto” at Fotomuseum Winterthur, “Art and Alphabet”, Kunsthalle Hamburg (2017), “New Photography”, Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015/16) and “No Man’s Land”, Rubell Family Collection (2015).
