Month: April 2010

Andrew Sendor // Thin Skinned.:::..

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Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present Thin Skinned, Andrew Sendor’s first exhibition with the
gallery, and his solo debut on the west coast of the United States. For the past six years, Sendor has been
deeply involved with a painting practice that investigates both the potential and the limitations of
representational painting. While Sendor’s paintings have evolved both materially and conceptually, the
motivation behind the work has always been characterized by a profound fascination in how ideas and
images are mediated through the language of painting.
This recent body of work, which Sendor created in Madrid, Spain, where he currently lives, is a
progression of uncanny hypothetical situations presented in the form of intimately sized, highly skilled oil
paintings. Sendor intelligently navigates his way through a web of delicate topics, such as the tenuous
boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between religious faith and philosophical inquiry, all
within a pictorial space that is clearly his own.
Thin Skinned features paintings that portray videos, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and, absurdly,
human-beings-as-art within the walls of museum and gallery spaces. This unexpected contextualization of
the figure, mysteriously frozen in a taxidermy form on pedestals, at once adopts a monumental status and
undermines accepted notions about what Art is, or what Art can be. While the depicted characters are
ostensibly functioning as the subjects, it is the setting in which they are found, in and amongst
appropriated artworks, that generates the questions embedded in Sendor’s ambitious painting project.
Exploring the role of the painter becomes a multifaceted endeavor for Sendor as he straddles the
vernaculars of historical genres and contemporaneous methodologies in painting, from nineteenth-century
portraiture to photorealism. As Jasper Sharp eloquently states, “Sendor does not set out with the express
intent to revise painting. Rather, with an educated consciousness of the work of his predecessors and the
debates that have swirled around contemporary art in recent years, he formulates his own visual language
and with it a distinctly personal sensibility.”

Andrew Sendor

Richard Heller Gallery

SPENCER FINCH

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Galerie Nordenhake has the great pleasure to present an exhibition with new works by US-American artist Spencer Finch, to open during the Gallery Weekend Berlin. Themes uniting the diverse works in the show are the complexities and pleasures of apprehending sensations. Most of the works deal with misperceptions or misapprehensions. They are treated not necessarily as failure but as pleasurable moments hinting at a seeing prior to recognition and rationalisation.

The seduction of misperception is suggested in a group of photographs: in reality representations of cherry blossoms in a pond, they appear as delicate images of clouds in the sky bringing to mind Alfred Stieglitz’ series of abstract photographs  “Equivalence”. In another work the white concrete sculptures sitting directly on the gallery floor recall piles of snow as they were ubiquitous in the streets during last winter.

The artist maps the limits of his own field of vision in a series of drawings that compare far peripheral and central vision, but they also contrast linguistic and visual descriptions of colour. Spencer Finch recored the colour of a car rushing by on a highway once it appeared in his field of vision and painted his colour impression with pigments on paper. Like an researcher, he adds a written account of the vehicle’s actual colour and form. The central vision differs from the perception in peripheral areas of the eye in respect to colour and form and proves it as erroneous.

The uncertainty of perception — that there is more to reality than our bodily senses could register — is implyed in the works after false-colour images. The colourful oil pastels look entirely abstract but are in fact truly representational as they render thermograms of the windows in the artist’s studio.

Spencer Finch is known for a multi-layered artistic practice in which he explores the mechanism and mysteries of perception. Many of his poetic and witty works aim at preserving the memory of a sensorial experience, be it a pile of snow or moonlight in Venice. He bases his unconventional and meticulous representations on extended research and rigorous measurement while his art acknowledges the difference and distance of all representation and reinforces the beauty of the fleeting nature of the observed world.

Nordenhake