Stefan Hirsig
08 Nov - 22 Dec 2007
STEFAN HIRSING
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based painter Stefan Hirsig, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Hirsig’s exuberant and complex large-scale compositions present a delirious amalgam of painting techniques: from color-field, geometric, and organic abstraction, through pop referentiality.
Working in acrylic on canvas, the artist embraces the full plasticity that the medium allows, filling up his canvases with teeming painterly events. Carefully rendered diamond-like facets unfold across delicately stained backgrounds, before being subsumed by a thick pouring of silver acrylic. Freely applied swathes of color end abruptly with strange geometric edges, underneath which another gestural layer sweeps in a counter direction.
Hirsig’s work evades art-historical distinctions between abstract and figurative. Colors and forms take on a lucid concreteness that seems to push itself toward the three-dimensional, while collaged elements such as images and fabric become assimilated as building blocks in the work’s sensual architecture. His paintwork plays with our expectations of gestural mark making - drips, pours, and freely-brushed elements often being revealed as controlled and lovingly-recreated representations of the ‘real‘ thing.
Music references abound, from the enigmatic song lyric fragments that serve as titles, to the artist’s knowing deployment of haptic collaged ‘artifacts’ such as vinyl records and album-covers.
Hirsig’s art is ultimately one of assimilation and fusion. References to art and pop history seem to float free of their earlier contexts in the parallel universe that is the artist’s painterly space. Constantly flipping between micro and macro scale, Hirsig’s euphoric imagery extends the ‘push and pull’ tension between depicted space and flat canvas to cosmic dimensions.
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based painter Stefan Hirsig, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Hirsig’s exuberant and complex large-scale compositions present a delirious amalgam of painting techniques: from color-field, geometric, and organic abstraction, through pop referentiality.
Working in acrylic on canvas, the artist embraces the full plasticity that the medium allows, filling up his canvases with teeming painterly events. Carefully rendered diamond-like facets unfold across delicately stained backgrounds, before being subsumed by a thick pouring of silver acrylic. Freely applied swathes of color end abruptly with strange geometric edges, underneath which another gestural layer sweeps in a counter direction.
Hirsig’s work evades art-historical distinctions between abstract and figurative. Colors and forms take on a lucid concreteness that seems to push itself toward the three-dimensional, while collaged elements such as images and fabric become assimilated as building blocks in the work’s sensual architecture. His paintwork plays with our expectations of gestural mark making - drips, pours, and freely-brushed elements often being revealed as controlled and lovingly-recreated representations of the ‘real‘ thing.
Music references abound, from the enigmatic song lyric fragments that serve as titles, to the artist’s knowing deployment of haptic collaged ‘artifacts’ such as vinyl records and album-covers.
Hirsig’s art is ultimately one of assimilation and fusion. References to art and pop history seem to float free of their earlier contexts in the parallel universe that is the artist’s painterly space. Constantly flipping between micro and macro scale, Hirsig’s euphoric imagery extends the ‘push and pull’ tension between depicted space and flat canvas to cosmic dimensions.