Markus Amm
Solo exhibition
January 15, 2009–February 14, 2009The Breeder, Athens
The Breeder gallery is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in Athens of German born, London based artist Markus Amm, that consists of new paintings, sculptures, photograms and wallpaintings.
Like silent x-rays and inverted silhouettes, the array of geometric abstractions in Amm’s canvas works appear as nearly cubistic imprints of shadow shapes, broken planes and the torn edges of elegantly textured surfaces. They seem to float and mingle with in their monochrome frames, seemingly unpinned from their material backing. The subtly painted layers, traced frames and outlines are composed and combined like a series of time lapse snapshots or stack of composited blue prints; each layer a solo antecedent yet intrinsic part of the work’s totality. Crushed, fragmented, stained or sliced the variety of textures and grains included in each work are often highlighted by a complementary curve, stripe or color tint that punctuates their mute demeanor to imbue the piece with a sense of intimacy, immediacy and mood.
In close proximity to his canvas works, Amm’s wall and sculptural pieces project his deftly constructed compositions from the surface of the canvas into the multi dimensional space of architecture. Through the careful application of surface treatments on walls, calculative placement of thin, angular, wood sculptures and the addition of signature painted fragments, Amm constructs a visual picture plane from the tangible gallery space. Framed and accented by their own structural elements, these painting-installations unfold and re-structure themselves as the viewer’s perspective crosses the space.
The body of work presented at the Breeder even though was not originally created within the gallery, triggers a dialogue with the architecture of the space. The walls, the mosaic floor, the light coming in different shapes and from various directions interact with the works and produce a new meaning, a fresh view on the three-dimensional space. At the gallery’s basement, the viewer comes across three bodies of work: black photographic paper (coin studies), museum barriers standing in vertical position (distance keepers) and wall painting (model), that act as collage elements and manage in a quite unexpected and paradoxical way to serve as a whole new system of reference. Amm, inspired by the miniatures of the gallery space, that the artists are used to build in order to have a first approach to the spatial arrangement of the gallery, painted on the walls a resemblance of the pieces of muskin-tape which hold the cardboard walls of those miniatures together. The model of the gallery space refers directly to the notion of the “white cube”, an art space deprived from external stimuli and ideal -in a laboratory-like shape- for political, economical, aesthetical and social experiments. The distance keepers, that museums use to prevent viewers from approaching works of art, are assembled in vertical compositions and reflected upon the black photograms become part of the model. Amm’s masterful presentation of such interrelationships of space and canvas, fragment and whole, present and process, is an exercise in abstraction that appears to have opened the way to new spheres of artistic production, merging format, structure and style.
Markus Amm was born in Germany in 1969 and he now lives and works in London. He has been included in numerous museum group shows over the last years like International Contemporary Art from the Collection of Burt Aaron, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, in the show Neuer Konstruktivismus, in Kunstverein Bielefeld, in the exhibition Language of Vision, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK. Other shows that he recently was included are Blind Date Passau, curated by Araine Grigoteit and Jessica Morgan, in the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Worlen, in Passau, Germany, in the show “DERECONSTRUCTION” in Barbara Gladstone gallery in NY that was curated by Matthew Higgs, in Blind Date -Sammlung Deutsche Bank-Galerie Kunstforum, Seligenstadt and in a duo show with Yesim Akdeniz in West London Projects that was curated by Christiane Schneider. Last year he was also included in the Triumph of Painting 4: Germania, in the Saatchi Gallery in London.
