Albert Baronian

Hedwig

19 Apr - 30 Jun 2008

© Stefan Pfeiffer
HEDWIG

April 19th 2008 to June 7th 2008

Baronian_Francey is pleased to present Hedwig, a special curatorial project by Thomas Zipp, featuring work by André Butzer, Peter Chevalier, Thilo Heinzmann, Thomas Helbig, Erwin Kneihsl, Martin Neumaier, Manfred Peckl, Stefan Pfeiffer, Felix Weber, Phillip Zaiser, and Thomas Zipp.
Appropriating traditional modes of painting and sculpture as a platform for contemporary reinvention, the exhibition explores the epitome of beauty as a tainted and subversive dimension. Through these artists’ rich and eclectic processes of making, material is treated as conceptual form, and craftsmanship the height of articulation. Positing intuition and ritual as sublime reflections of spirituality, modern myth, and heroic aura, Hedwig blurs the personal and authoritarian, the idealised and abject, as contemplative fields of anxiety and desire.
About some of the artists:
Butzer’s paintings reference German and American history, culture and politics (both historical and contemporary), art history, science fiction, comics and animation.
Infused with a sense of romantic grandeur, Chevalier’s masterfully executed canvases take the illusory qualities of painting to the extreme. Through his earthy palette and surreal compositions, his work unfolds with arresting spatial tension, synthesing in surfaces that are paradoxically concrete and volatile.
Heinzmann’s minimal compositions are flamboyantly punctilious. Made from media as diverse as glass, rock crystal, cairngorm, and aluminium, his collages exude polished luxury, setting aesthetic connoisseurship as a fetishisation of material substance and visual rectitude. Posing as sinister and futuristic relics, Helbig’s sculptures and paintings are made from common debris and found materials, implicating the stuff of everyday in his haunting icons of power and corruption.
Peckl’s sumptuous images are fabricated from shredded atlases, literally reconfiguring world order as disorientating landscapes and lusty portraits, transcribing global breakdown as consumptive and rapacious wonder.
Often drawing from his own suburban narratives Zaiser’s sculptures resound with theatricality. Through the raw physicality of his materials his works impose a sense of escapism or surreal encounter, rendering the fantastic in opulently tactile compositions.
Working across a wide range of media, Zipp’s work engages with an extravagant networking of ideas – ranging from history, science fiction, psychology, and subculture – creating complex fictional intersections between aesthetics, ideology, and ritual.
 

Tags: André Butzer, Thilo Heinzmann, Thomas Helbig, Erwin Kneihsl, Martin Neumaier, Manfred Peckl, Phillip Zaiser, Thomas Zipp