"Eigengrau" Exhibition

Storefront Ten Eyck

poster for "Eigengrau" Exhibition

This event has ended.

"Eigengrau," a German word meaning "intrinsic gray"--also referred to as dark light or brain gray--the color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. Seiden and Webster share an interest in Minimalism, from which they depart in a search to identify what cannot be named. Their work investigates absence, the numinous and meaning at the edge of perceptual and psychological experience, much as Eigengrau refers to neural activity in the absence of light.

Lauren Seiden creates atmospheric work that explores the relationship between light, line and dark ambiguities with attention to form, texture and surface. Her work explores the essential elements of process and materiality through an intuitive and intimate layering of graphite that tests the conventions of drawing, breaking down the surface and transforming the paper into a physical, metallic form. This process of rhythmic and layered mark-making results in compositions of subtle motion and tension that toy with a balance between control and chance. The work is simultaneously aggressive and hermetic, drawing the spectator into a dark, ominous world.

Frank Webster's paintings depict post-industrial landscapes and draw on the aesthetic traditions of Minimalism and Realism. Grounded in reality, the paintings abstract the ordinary so that the everyday world is made transcendent and strange and is imbued with an ethereal and melancholy beauty. The sharp juxtaposition of technology and romanticism evokes the environment in which we find ourselves and contemplates the paradox of this co-existence.

Kandinsky wrote that one of the paradoxes of modernism is that abstraction when pushed to its limit becomes realism, and realism taken to its extreme becomes abstraction. The work of these two artists offers an example of this theory. The paintings of Frank Webster appear to be highly realistic but on further contemplation become abstract. Lauren Seiden's drawings use an abstract vocabulary but assume the status of real objects in our environment. The work of Seiden and Webster is paradoxical and contradictory, outward and inward-looking, reminding us of art's ability to navigate the territory of the unknown.

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Schedule

from April 19, 2013 to May 19, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-04-19 from 18:00 to 21:00

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