Urban Art
17 Jan - 01 Feb 2009
URBAN ART (Marek Pisarsky +Anne Peschken)
"Globalpix"
16th January – 1st February 2009
Marek Pisarsky (*1956 in Poland) and Anne Peschken (*1966 in Montreal/Canada) have been working together under the name Urban Art since 1985. The artists live and work in Berlin and Myslibórz, Poland. As Urban Art, Peschken and Pisarsky practise interventions into public space belonging to the field of Concept Art, making use of a wide range of artistic media.
The exhibition Globalpix in Studio 1 shows a selection of large-format “pixel images” as well as a video which has been produced in the style of a documentary soap. In order to create the pixel images, the artists collect painted-on canvases discarded by other artists and cut them into strips so that only slight traces of the original painting remain visible.
After this, the strips are interwoven with one another on stretcher frames so that they generate basic structures for new images. These grid-shaped, square fields each represent one pixel when the images are painted later. The resulting images have a very coarse definition that can only be discerned properly from a distance. In search of up-to-date aesthetic and painterly forms of expression, parts of the images are painted over to produce a new composition, but fragments of the old painting are retained along with the memory of/an interlock with earlier art production.
Pisarsky’s and Peschken’s depictions of historical themes thus correspond to the double-perspective viewing suitable for pixel-images, for it seems we can perceive “history” more clearly from a greater (temporal) distance than we can when we are at the heart of (temporally close) events.
Entirely in the spirit of an extended concept of painting, these pixel images interweave various levels: they examine the question of artistic originality, (over-)production and utilisation, as well as processes of perceptual technique and cognitive science concerned with the composition of pictorial elements, the creation of illusions, the construction and de-construction of a panel picture, and finally also the generation of digital aesthetics using analogue means.
"Globalpix"
16th January – 1st February 2009
Marek Pisarsky (*1956 in Poland) and Anne Peschken (*1966 in Montreal/Canada) have been working together under the name Urban Art since 1985. The artists live and work in Berlin and Myslibórz, Poland. As Urban Art, Peschken and Pisarsky practise interventions into public space belonging to the field of Concept Art, making use of a wide range of artistic media.
The exhibition Globalpix in Studio 1 shows a selection of large-format “pixel images” as well as a video which has been produced in the style of a documentary soap. In order to create the pixel images, the artists collect painted-on canvases discarded by other artists and cut them into strips so that only slight traces of the original painting remain visible.
After this, the strips are interwoven with one another on stretcher frames so that they generate basic structures for new images. These grid-shaped, square fields each represent one pixel when the images are painted later. The resulting images have a very coarse definition that can only be discerned properly from a distance. In search of up-to-date aesthetic and painterly forms of expression, parts of the images are painted over to produce a new composition, but fragments of the old painting are retained along with the memory of/an interlock with earlier art production.
Pisarsky’s and Peschken’s depictions of historical themes thus correspond to the double-perspective viewing suitable for pixel-images, for it seems we can perceive “history” more clearly from a greater (temporal) distance than we can when we are at the heart of (temporally close) events.
Entirely in the spirit of an extended concept of painting, these pixel images interweave various levels: they examine the question of artistic originality, (over-)production and utilisation, as well as processes of perceptual technique and cognitive science concerned with the composition of pictorial elements, the creation of illusions, the construction and de-construction of a panel picture, and finally also the generation of digital aesthetics using analogue means.