Kes Zapkus and Stefan Gritsch “MATTER & CONJECTURE”
ART 3
This event has ended.
ART 3 presents in cooperation with Margarete Roeder gallery, MATTER & CONJECTURE, KES ZAPKUS STEFAN GRITSCH, a two person exhibition featuring paintings by Kes Zapkus in duality with Stefan Gritsch acrylic-pigment-matter blocks.
This exhibition derives its rationale from the title of a major painting by Kes Zapkus. Through its painterly rhetoric, Matter and Conjecture, 1990, would persuade us that contending forces fought out their territorial wars throughout the 1950s and beyond to determine which would become the prevailing definition of art. Constructed as an antagonistic duality, Matter and Conjecture is at once a test of such theory and a realization without compromise, for there is no smoothing over genuine difference on principle. The beauty of this work in its necessary as agon: to keep the engagement tantalizing.
Even so, what if matter were not inert, but an expression of the possibilities of construction? Stefan Gritsch manages to make the most of the least, and, ringing changes on method, to find eloquence even in mere acrylic pigment—matter. Aggregates in blocks or tile panes or kneaded lumps—all are productive of a sculptural practice at once in conversation with ‘Supports / Surfaces’ and the canon of modern abstraction. Intensity is the result: intensity of material reference from a history of art that matters.
So where Zapkus’s surfaces are rich in spatial memory, from aerial views and architectural plans, as if narrated by Cézanne, Gritsch’s surfaces are dense with visual knowledge infusing pigmental stuff, as if from a workshop which Naum Gabo would approve.
Kes Zapkus is an American Painter born in 1938 in Lithuania. He has exhibited extensively internationally and his work is in prestigious collections in the USA and abroad.
Stefan Gritsch is a Swiss artist born in 1951 in Switzerland, his work expands from drawing, collages, paintings, wall projects and tables with acrylic pigment matter blocks. He has had major exhibitions in Europe and New York.
Media
Schedule
from May 11, 2016 to June 19, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-05-20 from 18:00 to 21:00