Rainer Gross "Contact Paintings: Logos and Toons"
Margaret Thatcher Projects
This event has ended.
The gallery presents its first solo exhibition with New York-based German artist Rainer Gross. "Contact Paintings" brings together Gross’s painterly transformations of contemporary symbols-- primarily logos, animated Disney characters, and sports team trademarks.
In his essay accompanying the exhibition, art historian Michaël Amy observes: “Like (Jasper) Johns’ flags and targets, the images Gross has selected are both flat and man-made… These bold designs with their voluptuous curves or sharp edges and angles, and highly saturated, contrasting colors, were conceived to seize the eye. They are, for this reason, ideal territory for painting to explore. There is an "aw-shucks" type of admiration for these symbols of the American way embedded in these paintings, but it comes with a twist.”
Juxtaposing contemporary symbols with surfaces that evoke a sense of history, Rainer Gross conceives of these paintings from our contemporary global landscape, simultaneously displacing them from any specific moment or period. Gross significantly crops the logos or trademarks. In the painting process a series of water and oil based pigments are pressed together using two separate canvases. They are then gently peeled apart to reveal the look of worn surfaces. The two canvases may be exhibited together, as groups of double logos or exist individually.
[Image: Rainer Gross "Double Mickey and Minnie" (2012) Oil and pigments on canvas 244 x 244 cm.]
Media
Schedule
from February 14, 2013 to March 23, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-02-14 from 18:00 to 20:00