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.