Johannes Kahrs Exhibition
Luhring Augustine Gallery
This event has ended.
Luhring Augustine presents its second solo exhibition of new works by German artist Johannes Kahrs. The artist employs newspapers, magazines, films, advertisements, and his own photographic archive as subject matter for his paintings and drawings, and then reinterprets the source material by removing and altering signifying details contained in the image. Kahrs blurs, crops, and repositions the composition to reveal a unique but ambiguous rendering of the subject.
With this new body of work, Kahrs continues to pull compositional elements from images found in mass media. He highlights the interesting poses and unorthodox angles of his subject matter, choosing to portray moments either before or after a significant event transpires. The male figure featured in "Untitled (man sitting)" sits bandaged and bruised from an unspecified injury, his face is cropped out of the compositional frame, eliminating emotional cues as to a definitive sequence of events. As the viewer further inspects the figure, a feeling of sympathy arises as it becomes clear that the subject’s bandages are unable to fully cover his extensive injuries. The same vulnerability is suggested in "Untitled (white)", only here the male figure depicted is caressed by the hands of two anonymous women. While the content of this work emphasizes sexuality over violence, there is a raw physicality that unites all of Kahrs’ compositions, no matter the subject.
Johannes Kahrs was born in 1965 in Bremen, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin.
A catalog will be published on the occasion of this exhibition in conjunction with Kahrs’ 2010 exhibition at Zeno X, Antwerp.
[Image: Johannes Kahrs "Untitled (man sitting)" (2011) Oil on canvas 38 1/4 x 45 3/8 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2011 to October 22, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-09 from 18:00 to 20:00