Daniel Sinsel
Solo exhibition
September 25, 2008–October 25, 2008The Breeder, Athens
The Breeder is pleased to present Daniel Sinsel’s first solo show in Athens, which will be the inaugural exhibition of our new space on 45 Iasonos street in the Metaxourgio area of downtown Athens.
This show of new works plays out ideas of the physical and the utilitarian by means of finely-crafted sculptures and paintings of anthropomorphic objects, body parts and portraits. As in other recent work, Sinsel takes on the theme of pasta-making.
Sinsel delights in translating perishable materials into durable ones. Magazine cutouts, found objects, makeshift cardboard models – all these are brought together in tight compositions and transformed into distinct cultural objects. Meanwhile his paintings, precious and often trompe-l-oeil in effect, feature virtuosic renderings of nature, luxuriously twisting ribbons, blades, chocolate, phalluses, and homo-erotic portraits. Their underlying sensibility is both profane and ritualistic and imbues them with a dual air of intimate trophies and sacrilegious icons.
In rigid, minimalist compositions, cut-out discs in skin-like surface create new sculptural objects that hover between the bodily and the abstract. Holes and pasta shapes appear as orifices and fragments of the body, then in turn as scripture and lettering, alluding to the origin of language. In one group of works the shapes «a» and «o» are at once rotatable sculptures, speaking mouths, and detached, ornamental motifs. Elsewhere, the classical and the archaic are evoked by a series of terracotta vessels. At once humorous and erotic, these ceramic sculptures of cones with testicles appear generalised and universal. Their materially flesh-like look combined with their slight variation in ornamentation and perceived difference in gravitational pull give each of them a humanly individual inflection. Simplicity and functional logic are in contrast with an erotic lure of bodily weight and touch.
Daniel Sinsel was born in Germany in 1976 and he now lives and works in London. He studied in the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He has had solo shows in Sadie Coles HQ in London in 2007 and Luisa Strina gallery in Sao Paolo, Brazil in 2006. In 2006 he was nominated for the Beck’s Futures award that was presented in ICA in London. In Greece he has previously presented his work in the group show Strange Messengers in The Breeder in 2003.
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The Breeder’s new space is a former ice cream factory built in the 70s, that spreads over 550sqm in four diffenet floors. For the gallery needs the building has been completely renovated by the architectural office 405 of Aris Zampikos.
