Mark Power and Hans Witschi “Witschi/Power”
frosch & portmann
This event has ended.
frosch&portmann presents Witschi/Power. Faucets and Hoses, a duo exhibition with New York artists Mark Power and Hans Witschi.
The broader theme of our summer exhibition is water—more precisely, the hollow flexible or firm tubes used to convey the desired element. Hans Witschi’s faucet paintings cover the gallery walls, while all-white sculptures of different hoses by Mark Power occupy the space.
Power’s floor pieces are life-size and exact replicas of the real objects. The artist is interested in the use of words, and how our identification with them as they exist as objects can be compromised and challenged, redirected from the clinical and antiseptic to a feeling of emotion, time and intimacy. Power transforms anonymous utilitarian everyday objects into unique works of art, re-contextualized by material, surface and quantity. The logic, and eventual location of this “source material”, versus the venues they were cultivated from, create a dynamic that the artist works in and from. The use of a common non-decrypt commercial production material to describe all objects, brings things back to somewhat visually familiar territory, where the playing field is not equal, but in site.
Hans Witschi’s paintings range from funny and humorous to the abysmally painful. Strong in psychological impact and stylistically heterogeneous, the work conveys a message from a world of collapsed time. The figure, often dominant in Witschi’s oeuvre, is absent in the “Water Series” shown here. The first faucet appeared in a triptych that was part of the “Black Series” in 1983 and the artist kept on painting these minimal and abstracted elements ever since. Expressing an agonizing wait, it came from an early childhood observation of a severely retarded patient going back and forth with his finger under the running water. Later, it evolved into an analysis of culture, nature, urbanism, and architecture. The faucet became the symbol of our specific life situation in this civilization.
Mark Power lives and works in New York. He holds a B.F.A. from the Virginia Commonwealth University at Richmond, VA and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, NY. He received grants/awards from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Johnson Foundation.
Born in Switzerland, Hans Witschi studied painting in Zurich and moved to New York City in 1989, after receiving the Studio Grant by the City of Zurich. From 2008 to 2016 he was a Critique Artist and faculty member of the Art Students League, New York. Witschi’s collaboration with other artists include his piano music, spanning from Noritoshi Hirakawa’s video “A Destination of Ego” 1994 shown at MoMA PS1 to the 2014 performance with Bruno Jakob at the Kolumba Museum Cologne, Germany.
Media
Schedule
from July 21, 2016 to August 21, 2016
Summer Hours: Wed-Sat, 12-6pm.
Opening Reception on 2016-07-21 from 18:00 to 20:00