Taxter & Spengemann

Anna Schachte

24 Mar - 21 Apr 2007

© ANNA SCHACHTE
The Magic Hour, 2007
Oil and enamel on canvas
70 x 70 in
Anna Schachte
The Future is Here
March 24th to April 21st, 2007
Opening reception Saturday March 24th, 6 – 8 PM
robbinschilds performs in the gallery all day Saturday, March 31st.

Taxter & Spengemann is pleased to present new paintings by Anna Schachte downstairs and the premier screening of C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) Part 1, a movementbased video collaboration by dance duo robbinschilds and artist A.L. Steiner in the upstairs gallery. The artists each present a string of distinctly American landscapes, from majestic national parks to austere strip malls. These sites are acted upon physically with bodies and paint, at the intersection of commercial, cultural, critical and lyrical dichotomies.

I take the view that, as a contemporary artist who paints, I have a tourist’s eye. The tourist-painter, full of postmodern romanticism for the past and a desire to visit important historic sites, collects souvenirs in the hopes of making something new.

As a starting point for creating a new body of work I went on an imagined “Great American Road Trip.” Since my previous work has been largely concerned with comparing the past and the present of painting and popular history, I decided it was time to approach the future. In all earnestness, these two admittedly goofy images, the road
and the future, allowed me to imagine a story of painting’s future and to include myself in it. “The Future Is Here,” a group of new paintings of American places, exudes tourism, patriotism, skepticism, and optimism for the road ahead.

These paintings are about acts of looking and making pictures. They are filled with spectators, voyeurs and various picture-makers. Cartooning and architectural rendering are fused with drips, brushstrokes, and pools of paint to construct surreally familiar
landscape. The illustrative passages suggest a story, but most often a painting event completes the narrative equation and becomes the object of the tourist’s gaze.

--Anna Schachte

This is Anna Schachte’s 2nd solo exhibition with Taxter & Spengemann. Schachte’s painting Tunnel of Love, 2006, is part of the group exhibition Poets on Painters that opens at the
Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University on April 19th and is on view through August 5th. The artist received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004 and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. Her first solo exhibition was in June 2004 at Taxter & Spengemann. Please contact the gallery for further information.

 

Tags: A.L. Steiner