Marten Frerichs
10 Feb - 18 Mar 2006
Marten Frerichs
Ja
February 10 - March 18, 2006
From 10 February to 28 March, 2006, Galerie Jan Wentrup will present new paintings by the artist Marten Frerichs.
Born in North Shields (GB) in 1967, Frerichs studied art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from von 1993 to 1999.
Marten Frerichs lives and works in Berlin.
Marten Frerichs’ paintings present interior and exterior spaces.
The observers gazes into the chaotic corner of a room, through a wire mesh fence onto a snowy landscape, a brick wall, the sky. In these figureless pictures, only isolated objects like a telephone, basketball or television set refer to a person/inhabitant. These spaces provoke engagement by their sheer immediacy and size. While the absence of human figures in these works compels viewers to project themselves into these spaces, the flatness of their painterly presentation simultaneously closes them off. This prompts an interplay of participation and observation that results in an ambivalent reception process. Narrativity is thereby only a side-effect, not the primary objective. The theme of each work is viewers’ process of appropriation, their direct experience of, identification with and distancing from the picture space presented.
Often painted entirely in black and white or in a simplified poster-type colour range, the painting style faintly recalls the medium of the comic, also by its tendency towards stylized presentation. But this association is immediately broken again by the super-large format, smudged areas in the painting and submerged structures. Marten Frerichs deliberately disdains oils, the classic painting medium, using acrylic paints, ink, varnish or felt-tips instead.
The painter derives the subjects of his works from the inexhaustible sources of pop culture and its position between subculture and commerce.
The reference material thereby always serves only as the starting point of the painterly process, in which it is subjected to multiple modification and combination and used as a stereotyped reality. Alongside this operation, the repetition and combination of the painter’s own motif repertoire of fences, walls and trees can be motivated either thematically or as a formal aesthetic device. The aim is always the formulation of possibilities of reality, rather than its depiction.
© Marten Frerichs
"Just when u thought it was safe to buy the bootlegs"
acrylic, ink, lacquer pen on canvas
HxW: 320 x 200 cm
Ja
February 10 - March 18, 2006
From 10 February to 28 March, 2006, Galerie Jan Wentrup will present new paintings by the artist Marten Frerichs.
Born in North Shields (GB) in 1967, Frerichs studied art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from von 1993 to 1999.
Marten Frerichs lives and works in Berlin.
Marten Frerichs’ paintings present interior and exterior spaces.
The observers gazes into the chaotic corner of a room, through a wire mesh fence onto a snowy landscape, a brick wall, the sky. In these figureless pictures, only isolated objects like a telephone, basketball or television set refer to a person/inhabitant. These spaces provoke engagement by their sheer immediacy and size. While the absence of human figures in these works compels viewers to project themselves into these spaces, the flatness of their painterly presentation simultaneously closes them off. This prompts an interplay of participation and observation that results in an ambivalent reception process. Narrativity is thereby only a side-effect, not the primary objective. The theme of each work is viewers’ process of appropriation, their direct experience of, identification with and distancing from the picture space presented.
Often painted entirely in black and white or in a simplified poster-type colour range, the painting style faintly recalls the medium of the comic, also by its tendency towards stylized presentation. But this association is immediately broken again by the super-large format, smudged areas in the painting and submerged structures. Marten Frerichs deliberately disdains oils, the classic painting medium, using acrylic paints, ink, varnish or felt-tips instead.
The painter derives the subjects of his works from the inexhaustible sources of pop culture and its position between subculture and commerce.
The reference material thereby always serves only as the starting point of the painterly process, in which it is subjected to multiple modification and combination and used as a stereotyped reality. Alongside this operation, the repetition and combination of the painter’s own motif repertoire of fences, walls and trees can be motivated either thematically or as a formal aesthetic device. The aim is always the formulation of possibilities of reality, rather than its depiction.
© Marten Frerichs
"Just when u thought it was safe to buy the bootlegs"
acrylic, ink, lacquer pen on canvas
HxW: 320 x 200 cm