Nikolas Gambaroff
15 Nov 2015 - 09 Jan 2016
NIKOLAS GAMBAROFF
The truce hurts
15 November 2015 - 9 January 2016
Overduin and Co. is pleased to present The truce hurts, a solo exhibition by Nikolas Gambaroff. This exhibition features a new body of work consisting of a group of paintings and sculptures, alongside bronze masks and video.
The point of departure for each of the new paintings is a found image taken from a selection of recent photographs from The New York Times. Each photographic image undergoes a series of material conversions. The results take on the same material properties of the newsprint pages that Gambaroff used in previous works, while also recording painting in an in-between state, frozen in a moment of permanent flux.
The works are mounted on panels and interspersed throughout the main gallery. The panels range from flats, shaped wedges, and a Judd-like box, to forms that enter the realm of the applied arts: shelves, a bench, and a room screen.
The installation is punctuated by a number of bronze masks that allude to a language of expressionism and evoke historical artifacts. The motif of the mask has been the subject of an ongoing series of sculptural work over the past few years and has become the catalyst for an investigation into figurative motifs and quasiexpressive gestures within Gambaroff’s work.
In this exhibition, the mask is also the subject of 2 videos. The masks are turned into digital 3D models that record the movement of actors’ faces via motion capture. Gambaroff transfers the masks into a virtual space and has these digital actors engage in different speech acts and moments that sometimes appear like speech lessons. Here, language, which mostly appeared in deconstructed or ruptured form in Gambaroff’s work in recent years, returns as speech and unpacks latent expressive potential within the procedural constraints of mechanical and digital image production.
Nikolas Gambaroff was born in Germany in 1979, and currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and received an MFA from Bard College in New York in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include: Meyer Kainer in Vienna, Gio Marconi in Milan, The Power Station in Dallas, White Cube in London, and Balice Hertling in Paris. Gambaroff's work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New Museum in New York, Kunsthalle Zurich, Bergen Kunsthalle, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and Künstlerhaus Halle fur Kunst in Graz among others. A monograph was published this month to accompany the Power Station exhibition and includes an essay by Alex Kitnick.
The truce hurts
15 November 2015 - 9 January 2016
Overduin and Co. is pleased to present The truce hurts, a solo exhibition by Nikolas Gambaroff. This exhibition features a new body of work consisting of a group of paintings and sculptures, alongside bronze masks and video.
The point of departure for each of the new paintings is a found image taken from a selection of recent photographs from The New York Times. Each photographic image undergoes a series of material conversions. The results take on the same material properties of the newsprint pages that Gambaroff used in previous works, while also recording painting in an in-between state, frozen in a moment of permanent flux.
The works are mounted on panels and interspersed throughout the main gallery. The panels range from flats, shaped wedges, and a Judd-like box, to forms that enter the realm of the applied arts: shelves, a bench, and a room screen.
The installation is punctuated by a number of bronze masks that allude to a language of expressionism and evoke historical artifacts. The motif of the mask has been the subject of an ongoing series of sculptural work over the past few years and has become the catalyst for an investigation into figurative motifs and quasiexpressive gestures within Gambaroff’s work.
In this exhibition, the mask is also the subject of 2 videos. The masks are turned into digital 3D models that record the movement of actors’ faces via motion capture. Gambaroff transfers the masks into a virtual space and has these digital actors engage in different speech acts and moments that sometimes appear like speech lessons. Here, language, which mostly appeared in deconstructed or ruptured form in Gambaroff’s work in recent years, returns as speech and unpacks latent expressive potential within the procedural constraints of mechanical and digital image production.
Nikolas Gambaroff was born in Germany in 1979, and currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and received an MFA from Bard College in New York in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include: Meyer Kainer in Vienna, Gio Marconi in Milan, The Power Station in Dallas, White Cube in London, and Balice Hertling in Paris. Gambaroff's work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New Museum in New York, Kunsthalle Zurich, Bergen Kunsthalle, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and Künstlerhaus Halle fur Kunst in Graz among others. A monograph was published this month to accompany the Power Station exhibition and includes an essay by Alex Kitnick.