Adrian Schiess
06 Mar - 10 Apr 2008
ADRIAN SCHIESS
Adrian Schiess was born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1959 and currently lives in the village of Mouans-Sartoux in southern France. He represented Switzerland at the 1990 Venice Biennale, participated in Documenta IX, Kassel, and more recently has exhibited work at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Museu Serralves, Porto; ZKM, Karlsruhe; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Right now his show Off the Wall can be seen at the Indianapolis Art Museum until 27th April. Galería Distrito Cu4tro is pleased to show his most recent paintings.
The artist Adrian Schiess has been exhibiting his trademark "flat" paintings internationally since 1987. These large aluminum panels, which comprise most of this exhibition, are rendered in enamel or digital prints covered with lacquer. Adrian Schiess has one rule for his panels: they are never hung on a wall, rather, the artist places the works on the floor or upright against a wall –they are free to take up a variety of presentation formats: they can be seen stacked on top of each other in one broad, large-scale installation, or appear in a solitary, subtle arrangement- Their glossy surfaces are intended to reflect the passage of time, light, and people in the environment. Changes in daylight, foliage and seasonal weather will alter the appearance of colour over the course of the exhibition. Adrian Schiess uses the gallery as a provisional studio space for producing his unique painting project. To quote Schiess himself ‘The paintings on plates are to be understood as conceptual paintings, conceived as a work in progress. I take the continuously growing number of plates to be a single entity , an enormous, constantly growing picture in constant change, which I never stop working on. Each single plate functions as a fragment, a piece of mosaic or even a pixel. Thus I see any single plate as well as any composition of various plates as fragments of this work in progress, of this infinitely open painting, whose shiny surfaces are reflecting the eternally fleeting images of reality and the present’
Shiess says –referring to his monochrome plates- that he dreams of colours floating by, and then the same board is purple, blue or green. This is related to the way he associates the idea of inner spaces with colour. The relationship of colour and space is much more important to him than its connection with form, which is secondary to him. Painting is always bound up with matter.
Adrian Schiess was born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1959 and currently lives in the village of Mouans-Sartoux in southern France. He represented Switzerland at the 1990 Venice Biennale, participated in Documenta IX, Kassel, and more recently has exhibited work at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Museu Serralves, Porto; ZKM, Karlsruhe; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Right now his show Off the Wall can be seen at the Indianapolis Art Museum until 27th April. Galería Distrito Cu4tro is pleased to show his most recent paintings.
The artist Adrian Schiess has been exhibiting his trademark "flat" paintings internationally since 1987. These large aluminum panels, which comprise most of this exhibition, are rendered in enamel or digital prints covered with lacquer. Adrian Schiess has one rule for his panels: they are never hung on a wall, rather, the artist places the works on the floor or upright against a wall –they are free to take up a variety of presentation formats: they can be seen stacked on top of each other in one broad, large-scale installation, or appear in a solitary, subtle arrangement- Their glossy surfaces are intended to reflect the passage of time, light, and people in the environment. Changes in daylight, foliage and seasonal weather will alter the appearance of colour over the course of the exhibition. Adrian Schiess uses the gallery as a provisional studio space for producing his unique painting project. To quote Schiess himself ‘The paintings on plates are to be understood as conceptual paintings, conceived as a work in progress. I take the continuously growing number of plates to be a single entity , an enormous, constantly growing picture in constant change, which I never stop working on. Each single plate functions as a fragment, a piece of mosaic or even a pixel. Thus I see any single plate as well as any composition of various plates as fragments of this work in progress, of this infinitely open painting, whose shiny surfaces are reflecting the eternally fleeting images of reality and the present’
Shiess says –referring to his monochrome plates- that he dreams of colours floating by, and then the same board is purple, blue or green. This is related to the way he associates the idea of inner spaces with colour. The relationship of colour and space is much more important to him than its connection with form, which is secondary to him. Painting is always bound up with matter.