Kim Nekarda
10 Mar - 14 Apr 2012
KIM NEKARDA
es gibt eine andere Welt, aber sie ist in dieser
10 March - 14 April, 2012
The fact that a glance through the front window of a young contemporary art gallery is met with the image of the prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx – a painted one in fact, rendered on a 200 x 170 cm canvas – would certainly take even the seasoned art flaneur by surprise. After all, doesn’t the majority of the most current contemporary art we are confronted with present us with conceptually-minded attempts at “art about art,” in other words more or less visually translated, pre-devised cross-media references or network constructions that only ever seem to comment on themselves?
Moving beyond the discourse of “Painting Beside Itself” (David Joselit) or “Expanded Painting,” Kim Nekarda’s recent paintings of a famous fossil, a jellyfish or other underwater creatures - which shift between representation and abstraction - look beyond the art industry and open windows, so to speak, to “another” world, to larger contexts that are just as real and grounded in the physical world, even if we are unable to see them directly and cannot grasp them in any immediate way. He confronts us, in a certain sense, with our own blindness towards such phenomena. So the exhibition title does not point to a supernatural, surreal sphere, but rather to the wondrous impressions that our world itself has to offer, wonders that are often known and accessible only to specialists such as paleontologists and marine biologists.
es gibt eine andere Welt, aber sie ist in dieser
10 March - 14 April, 2012
The fact that a glance through the front window of a young contemporary art gallery is met with the image of the prehistoric bird Archaeopteryx – a painted one in fact, rendered on a 200 x 170 cm canvas – would certainly take even the seasoned art flaneur by surprise. After all, doesn’t the majority of the most current contemporary art we are confronted with present us with conceptually-minded attempts at “art about art,” in other words more or less visually translated, pre-devised cross-media references or network constructions that only ever seem to comment on themselves?
Moving beyond the discourse of “Painting Beside Itself” (David Joselit) or “Expanded Painting,” Kim Nekarda’s recent paintings of a famous fossil, a jellyfish or other underwater creatures - which shift between representation and abstraction - look beyond the art industry and open windows, so to speak, to “another” world, to larger contexts that are just as real and grounded in the physical world, even if we are unable to see them directly and cannot grasp them in any immediate way. He confronts us, in a certain sense, with our own blindness towards such phenomena. So the exhibition title does not point to a supernatural, surreal sphere, but rather to the wondrous impressions that our world itself has to offer, wonders that are often known and accessible only to specialists such as paleontologists and marine biologists.