NYAB Event - Johannes VanDerBeek “Early Hand”

Johannes VanDerBeek “Early Hand”

Zach Feuer Gallery

This event has ended.

In his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Johannes VanDerBeek explores his interest in how the process of seeing and understanding is constantly evolving based on stages of human development. Following the birth of his daughter, VanDerBeek became fascinated with imagining how she was seeing the world without the pre-associations that language provides. In envisioning the frenzied mental landscape where things are experienced as phenomenon and how over time the perception of the external world is filled in with more specific information, the works in the show evoke different phases of resolution and visual representation.

Through several bodies of work, VanDerBeek plays with how materiality can be used to create objects and images that range in stylistic formation. In a series of cast wall works the picture plane is filled to varying densities with marks made of clay and resin. In some works the figures and formations remain in raw states, alluding to a skeletal framing of the subject that allows the viewer to imbue their own thoughts and ideas of what they are seeing—while other works progress to more explicit and detailed imagery. These depictions mimic the comprehension abilities from baby to child to adult, as information or knowledge is gained, and a more complete picture begins to
form.

The ideas of development run parallel to advances in art history, and how art traces our level of consciousness. Cave drawings were typically outlines or simple marks that conveyed their subjects bluntly and reveal a species at the dawn of its empire. As self-awareness grew and our collective knowledge accelerated, art became increasingly refined—much the way self-portraiture can evolve from a series of circles and triangles to moodily crosshatched visages during an individual’s maturation. VanDerBeek alludes to a sort of neo-primitivism in this show that uses planes and lines to juxtapose abstraction with figuration and flatness with depth. He explores the ability to create space, surface and texture beyond the physical usage of a typical three-dimensional sculptural form.
Bridging printmaking, painting, sculpture and drawing, VanDerBeek continues his use of materials as a way to create unexpected visual clues. As the viewer examines the works, processes slowly reveal themselves and objects in the exhibition unfold in different directions. These objects require looking, and provoke questions about how physicality can emulate shifting mental states.

Johannes VanDerBeek (b. 1982, Baltimore, MD) graduated from Cooper Union in 2004. His work has been featured in High, Low & In Between at White Flag Projects in St. Louis, A Disagreeable Object at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, National Projects at PS1/MoMA, Amazement Park: Stan, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Personal Freedom, Portugal Arte 10 Biennial and Trapdoor, an exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund at MetroTech. VanDerBeek lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.