The current exhibition ‘Material Tension’ brings together a group of works created in 2021 and 2022. Robert Currie (*1976, London) had the specific challenges of our gallery space in mind when making his selection, which features a stark element of contrast, the geometric-abstract vis-à-vis the photorealistic-representational.

His work draws on chaos theory, a catch-all for at times opposing views that, however, all share the fundamental idea that order arises from chaos. Currie is also informed by the theory of complexity, which postulates that a sufficient degree of order will always occur and become manifest.

The materials with which Currie works (formerly often video and audio tape, now mainly fine, variously colored nylon threads) are particularly well suited to creating the complex structures that arise from densification and sequencing, which characterize mainly his geometric pieces. The power of these works lies in their austerity, as though large dynamic-chaotic structures have picked a moment of absolute order to come to a complete standstill. They radiate an immense aura of contemplation. The artist shows these new black and white and bicolored wall pieces in the middle, cabinet space of the gallery.

A hanging work called the ‘Guggenheim Piece’ floats in space, acting as a transition to the three-dimensional representational wall pieces in the two white rooms adjoining the center space on either side. The free-hanging piece consists of taut transparent nylon strings, spanned densely at regular intervals. When viewed from a particular distance and angle, the countless miniscule black acrylic paint dots applied to the string ‘canvas’ reveal an almost photographic image of the interior of the original New York Guggenheim Museum.

Photographs are also the starting point for the new three-dimensional wall pieces, which follow the same principal as the ‚Guggenheim Piece’ but are housed in Plexiglas showcases. The new motifs are houses and other buildings situated in evocative landscapes; environments that appear to have once been meaningful and viable until, sometime later, being abandoned. They show no sign of human presence, at any rate. Shades of Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha.

The two new forest-themed pieces are black and white; the landscapes and building situations (e.g. a nighttime shot of an American gas station) are in color, acrylic paint on transparent nylon strings, with an additional, highly connotative painted image in the background.

Currie’s three-dimensional pictures unite dynamics, rhythm and movement, light and space. The artist thus also explores possibilities of physically involving viewers in the visual reception of the works. One must locate and assume the precise position in the space from which the image comes fully into view. The viewer becomes part of a choreography; a dynamic process by which the particles brought to a standstill at that special sweet spot momentarily reveal an image, which is then rendered evanescent by the slightest next move. Here, too, the artist shows an apparent interest in the way bodies of various densities reveal their own breathtaking order within an ossified, equalized or compressed vortex.

Robert Currie studied at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art in London. His work can be found in numerous collections at home and abroad (Lady De Rothschild, Gottfried Schulz AG, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Defauwes, Simmons & Simmons) as well as in public spaces in Frankfurt, London and Brussels.

“Looking is, I feel, a vital aspect of existence. Perception constitutes our awareness of what it is to be human, indeed what it is to be alive” Bridget Riley. 2017

The Van der Grinten Galerie last presented Robert Currie works in 2013. So we are especially pleased to open this long-awaited solo exhibition of the London-based artist’s completely new works.

Robert Currie (*1976, GB) works across the mediums of sculpture, installation and drawing to produce work that explores the inevitable emergence of order from disorder. This creates a physical sensation and redirects our way of viewing. In his three-dimensional paintings Currie generates dynamic energy, rhythm, movement, light and space as he investigates different possibilities for physically engaging the viewer in the visual perception of a work.

In this new exhibition, Currie presents new iterations of his wall-based kinetic artworks, for the first time in colour. Contrary to the earlier works in monochrome black or very subdued colourations, here the human hand that applies the colour in a painterly action is much more strongly emphasized: still strictly systematically constructed of rows of thousands nylon strands within a big Perspex case, each strand is hand painted with absolute precision in various colours. The resulting motif, however, can only be seen from one particular standpoint, which the viewer must first find by moving back and forth in the space in front of the work. The artwork, in other words, prompts the viewer to engage in a sort of choreography. With their strictly formal, linear construction, the sculptural canvasses strongly reference architecture – a field that has always been an important source of inspiration for Currie – but they also play with counteracting effects of the ephemeral and the deceptive. The images oscillate between the abstract and the photographic, while a closer study of the individual painted strands opens the process of painting and time to the viewing eye: the work becomes an “exploded” canvas.

The new motifs draw on places and spaces that people have made their own, ambient spaces that were once useful and productive for a time, but were later abandoned. The neglect and dereliction of these subjects gives rise to a new sense of loneliness and tranquillity. Comparisons with Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha are apparent. Blended with the influence of Currie’s fascination for 1960’s Op-art and its protagonists, such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, completely new visual and spatial possibilities arise, in which a combination of poetical mood and precision structure join in a unique union.

Robert Currie studied at the Manchester Metropolitan University and at the Royal College of Art in London. His works are represented in numerous collections in the UK and abroad (Lady De Rothschild, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Defauwes and Simmons & Simmons) and in public spaces in Frankfurt, London and Brussels.

Van der Grinten Gallery is looking forward to the start of the season in September 2013 that opens with the dual exhibition “Light Structures”, featuring new works by Pierre Faure (*1964, France) and Robert Currie (*1976, UK).

Under this exhibition title, a dialogue between the works of these two artists is spun out. Their engagement with the possibilities of seeing and interpreting the available architectural space in its varying degrees of abstraction opens up a new visual experience for viewers.

Pierre Faure’s photographic works were shown in Cologne for the #rst time in 2000 within the framework of an exhibition series on young French contemporary art. Typical of Faure’s first work group was his interest in seemingly banal urban landscapes in which the human figure appears isolated, as though on a stage. His artistic focus is precisely on these “choreographies of the everyday” and is nurtured by his reading of French and international social theoreticians, critics and philosophers, as well as by cinematic aesthetics. With his second work group “Japan” (2005/2007) on the city views of a modern metropolis like Tokyo, Faure had begun to work out what is therein exemplary via the simple but ingenious blacking of the sky. Parallel to this, Pierre Faure created almost portrait-like images of people on the street and in cafés or public places, which he partly combined into montages.

Under the title “Drift”, “Wallpaper” and “Light Structures”, Faure’s newer photos continue the gesture of the intuitive assembling of everyday impressions, on the one hand, but, on the other, go even further in the reduction of the elements via the possibilities offered by digital editing. In this way the artist attempts to remove almost all the original content of the information from his shots. In the black- and-white photographs developed on baryta paper, only the most minimal components of the original pictures are legible. These are however organized in an innovative flat-plane stratagem and a drawing-like, linear configuration. With “Light Structures” Faure goes one step further, in that the main motif of the photos are simple scaffolds, i.e., structures that are perhaps little noticed but are ubiquitous in our immediate urban environs. These “constructions” reduced to their essence are visually composed simply of lines and joints, to the artist a symbol of a pictorial construct per se.

Pierre Faure’s works have been shown in institutional group exhibits in Winterthur, Amsterdam and Cologne as well as in numerous museums and institutions in France.

He is represented with works from various series, among others, in the collections of the Huis Marseille Amsterdam, FNAC Paris, Dresdner Bank/Commerzbank Frankfurt.

Pure structures likewise define the sculptural works by Robert Currie, which he makes into objects that are amazingly alive and energized. Born in 1976 and resident in London, Currie has for some years appeared on the art world scene with three-dimensional wall works and installations. His favorite material—besides his use of cassette and video tape—is nylon string, which he spans in precise patterns crosswise or lengthwise into Plexiglas cases. When these abstract vitrines are walked past, they generate a strong flickering sensation, and their interior body mass seems to expand infinitely. In his figurative works that seem like three-dimensional photographs, Currie applies black acrylic paint to an assemblage of nylon strings that are spanned in layers, arranged one behind the other. These works force the viewer to seek a standpoint that affords a view of the depiction in its entirety. Not till then do viewers have the possibility of perceiving them in their photographesque presence.

In the present exhibition, Robert Currie is showing completely new, freestanding objects. The geometric structures out of different colored nylon strings flow together from all sides. Whereby complex spatial drawings emerge that recall either a vortex or strict constructions.

Robert Currie studied at the Manchester Metropolitan University and at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2006 he was awarded a one-year scholarship from the London Florence Trust. In the meantime, his works can be found in many collections inland and abroad (Lady De Rothschild, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Defauwes, Simmons & Simmons) and in the public space in Frankfurt, London and Brussels.