Office Baroque

Daniel Sinsel

20 Nov 2011 - 14 Jan 2012

© Daniel Sinsel
Untitled, 2011
Oil on canvas
39 x 51 cm
DANIEL SINSEL
20 November, 2011 – 14 January, 2012

Office Baroque Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Daniel Sinsel. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Sinsel’s minimal yet intricately detailed works reflect a focus on the nature of painting and sculpture and on the particular qualities and associations of the materials he uses. These materials carry meaning through their origins and historical resonances. Vellum –essentially animal skin- is either cut o woven to form columns and pipes. Sinsel underscores the alchemy using one material as the basis for representing another material.

His paintings are indebted to art history, working through its formal and iconographic developments. The canvases are small in scale and rendered using a crisp, firmly delineated style achieved through the traditional method of building up multiple layers of oil paint on prepared linen supports. Sinsel’s frequent use of trompe l’oeil celebrates skillfulness while always signaling the limits of representation. Peeking and trying to look under things, peering at cuts, punctures, slices and slits form part of the pleasure of looking at Sinsel’s paintings.

His sculptures feel preoccupied with spaces, forms and textures. These tactile pieces speak of craft-based methods of construction such as weaving, folding and sewing, through which states of rigidity and flaccidity are alluded to in various forms. Despite the technical nature of their making, the result is human, sensual and anti-modernist in form. Sinsel’s use of raw silk in creating a hand-woven seamless fabric sculpture inverts the notion of the canvas as support for the image, with the support becoming the subject itself.

Daniel Sinsel’s fidelity to traditional pictorial genres rendered in oil on canvas, as well as his employment of age-old craft techniques in the fabrication of his objects (including metalworking, ceramics and casting) seems intent on making us aware of the time and labor invested in them. The work fascinates in how it is knowingly constructed against the contemporary quick-fire economy in which it also circulates.

Born in 1976 in Munich, Daniel Sinsel received his B.A. in painting from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, in 2002 and his M.F. in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2004.

Over the past years, Sinsel has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including the Chisenhale Gallery in London (2011); Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin (2009); The Breeder, Athens (2008); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2009 & 2007) and Luisa Strina Sao Paulo (2006). His work was included in group exhibitions at Kaleidoscipe Project Space, Milan (2011); Galeria Franco Noero, Milan (2010); Jerwood Space, London (2010); Royal College of Art, London (2009); MoMA, New York (2009); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2007); Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2005) and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2004).

In 2001 Daniel Sinsel was awarded the Arthur Anderson Chelsea College Fine Art Award. He lives and works in London.
 

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