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A Tree in the Grand Hotel
Dec 13–Jan 30, 2021GOLESTANI is pleased to present an online exhibition with works by Siegfried Anzinger, Raynes E. Birkbeck, LaKela Brown, Amadeus Certa, Mariah Dekkenga, Manshu-Rhan Park, Hubert Schmalix and Stefan Theissen, which displays the union of artistic positions marking the end of the year. These artworks carried us through the year and moved us in a special way.
We wish everyone a relaxed end to the year, and a contemplative and happy holiday. Stay safe and healthy!
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Siegfried Anzinger
The subjects in Anzinger's paintings appear as a comment upon classical themes and can be critical, political, ironic or humorous, and inspire questions. The intermediate position is significant to Anzinger's work, a place between traditional picture scheme and modern doubts on the validity of previous methodologies. Instantly recognizable motifs pave an approach to painterly queries: the development of space, the appearance of color and brushstroke, and how the entire composition is realized. Anzinger's open-ended, reverse practice was discussed in an interview with Max Hollein, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City): "When the viewers think they are on familiar ground, they slowly lose that certainty, not the other way around. Many artists destabilize the viewers and ultimately the viewers are getting more and more secure and know what they have in front of them, and then it's all said and seen and done with. I would like to depart from clarity and reach a stage of dissolution, where you don't really know what's what in the end." —Siegfried Anzinger
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Siegfried Anzinger (b. 1953, Austrian) has held several notable national and international exhibitions, such as participation in Documenta 7 (1982) and representing the Austrian pavilion at the Biennale in Venice 1988. Anzinger was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in 1986 and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts in 2003. His work is in the collections of the MoMA (New York City), Kolumba Museum (Cologne, DE), Belvedere (Vienna, AUS) and numerous other institutions. His influence extends to a young generation of artists as well. Due not only to his painting professorship at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (since 1998), but because he is more of a support system than a teacher. Anzinger stands for the freedom of expression in art. Until today, he continues his search for new solutions in painting.
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Raynes E. Birkbeck
In the artist’s latest body of work, Birkbeck envisioned Germany, a place he’s never been. Combining polyamory and German folklore with imagined prehistoric history, both dinosaurs and lederhosen-clad hunters linger amongst dark trees. In the painting “Alpine Love,” after climbing the Alps, a group of men make love on the summit. Birkbeck has an aptitude for pulling together a wide range of references and improvising disparate connections. Discussing his thought process behind the painting, he explains, “I was imagining what it would be like in Germany. I’ve seen enough pictures to know about The Schwarzwald. I also know when the Dutch and Germans settled Africa, they called it the Wald. And Americans had a famous president with ‘velt’ in his last name, Roosevelt. Roose is roses. Maybe it means flowering forest? Something like that.” Birkbeck’s artworks follow this personalized logic with liberal doses of free association. He doesn’t censor himself, rather indulges the subconscious. The results reveal a diverse cast of historical and contemporary personas that co-exist on multiple, simultaneous timelines.
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RAYNES BIRKBECK (b. 1956, The Bronx) lives and works in Manhattan. He is a self-taught artist who paints, sculpts, draws, and writes poetry. He has exhibited work at SITUATIONS, New York; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin, Italy; The Bureau of General Services -- Queer Division, New York; The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York; Fierman Gallery, New York; Safe Gallery, Brooklyn; and Apexart, New York. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Vault Magazine amongst others.
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Amadeus Certa
If Amadeus Certa is interested in reality at all, then, how far the unreal, the dreamed, enigmatic mythologies are compatible with what we call reality. He deconstructs his popcultural objects and finds a form, that denies the shine of the surface and searches it in colors only: a painterly approach, that does not copy product aesthetics rather than dealing with genuine painterly questions. Certas pictures are paintings, but through the lines also drawings, luckily unfinished. A combination of logics and vagueness, that can only rest in dreams, and in art.
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Amadeus Certa (b. 1992, German) has finished his studies of painting and graphics as an master student of Siegfried Anzinger at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. For his degree show he was awarded by the Academy with the degree´s prize in 2016. Lately in 2018 Certa was honoured with the Heinrich-Vetter-Prize for Visual Arts. Certa´s work was shown in several national and international exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, New York and Toronto, among them the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and Port 25 Museum for Contemporary Art Mannheim.
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Manshu-Rhan Park
Sometimes smoking, sometimes soming mouths, shear-cut silhouettes that invert body into the surface, stacked, roughly outlined, staggered and shortened, Manshu-Rhan Park takes into account pictorial space, laws of nature on the verge of the possible. Then a sailor who recalls David's Death of Marat, not a dying man, but blue, abandoned by all spirits of life and slaps in the hangover; stroke scenes, the day after - escapades that are not exhausted in exuberance, not in the momentary and content, and eternally resonate in form and color.
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Manshu-Rhan Park (b. 1993, German) graduated with painting and graphics as a master student of Siegfried Anzinger at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since then, his works have been on display regularly in Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, and Paderborn, as well as at international art fairs. In 2020, Manshu-Rhan Park was nominated for the Kunstpreis of Sparkasse Karlsruhe.
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Mariah Dekkenga
Known for colorful geometric abstraction, her methodology builds upon color theory to present a vast range of hues in complex compositions. She has developed a personalized system of arriving at her configurations via computer software. Selected digital compositions are transferred by hand, fusing computerized color scales and painterly gestures. Rectilinear shapes divide the canvas the way multiple windows and tabs lie open on a computer screen. Paint on the surface appears as if it were printed over an abstract expressionist painting, creating continually shifting perception.
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Mariah Dekkenga (b. 1978, Marathon, Wisconsin) lives between Doha, Qatar & Randolph, VT. She has held solo and two-person exhibitions at SITUATIONS, New York; Aetopolous Gallery, Athens Greece; Eli Ping Frances Perkins, New York; and Jackie Klempay Gallery, Brooklyn. Selected group exhibitions include Clifton Benevento, New York; Suzanne Geiss, New York; The Hole, New York; Denny Gallery, New York; and The Fire Station, Doha, Qatar. She graduated from The University of Iowa with a MFA in 2008 and has since participated in residencies at the Babayan Culture House in Cappadocia, Turkey; Takt Kunstraum Tapir in Berlin; and Officina Stamperia del Notaio in Tusa, Spain. Her work is held in the collections of QMA Qatar Museums, Doha Qatar, Aïshti Foundation Collection, Beirut, Lebanon, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, the New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY, and the Collection of the US Embassy in Nogales, Mexico.
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Stefan Theissen
A light layer of paint lays down on the dark substrate. But perhaps a bright cloud floats in empty, cosmic space. The relationship between color and image carrier always remains ambiguous in Stefan Theissens works. Sometimes the color adheres to its bottom, sometimes it seems to spread in a dimension, to create space. Transparent and fragile, the paint dust is then on a kind of arcade. Tissows scatter pigments on an acrylic basis, laid out on canvas or nettle. His compositions, all pigment works, are thus also determined by chance. As a drawing element, he occasionally works on threads on the image carrier. With pigments and liquid paint, Theissen explores the different manifestations of color, the effect of their different aggregate states on the canvas. It can flow hard and thick, or fine. Even perky splashes and colored threads, abstract expressionist, pull over the canvas, make them disappear.
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Broader color assignments lead to scribbling with a coarse stroke. They cover the picture carrier without wanting to hide a motif. Often the paint atomizes at the end of the application, which can be flat or linear. On the translucent image carrier, she then creates fine pastel nebula, star dust. Bright clouds of color explode, glitter, and shimmer like rainbow-colored aurorae. And occasionally, drops and plugs mix under the paint dust—dry dust and liquid come together. But they can also fight, then one physical state becomes main actor, displaced the other and the image background. Theissens pictures are then either transparent watercolors or painted with brittle chalk. Always in motion, the spreading ink application becomes the cross-border worker of the sensually experienced. Theissen sees his pictures as arrangements of a fleeting state, as moments of transition. Fragrances are transferred to color barts, the fragrant is given an appearance. The spray water becomes heavier, thicker, finally colorful.
Stefan Theissen (b. 1977, German) has finished his studies of painting as a master student of Tal R at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since then, his work was shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and New York, among them Museum KIT–Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf and CFA, Berlin.
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LaKela Brown
LaKela Brown´s plaster bas-reliefs echo the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman friezes. Formal repetition of shapes cast in bright white plaster initially appear as an abstract visual language, however her process involves casting jewelry of the 1990’s hip hop era, such as bamboo earrings, gold-capped teeth, and rope necklace chains, alongside other relics frequently attributed to African-American culture. Gold acrylic paint on some of the earrings point to value structures and a symbol of social standing. These shapes are not arbitrarily chosen or collected, they hold a deep significance for the artist and culture she grew up in.
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LaKela Brown (b. 1982, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Brown received her B.F.A. from the College for Creative Studies in 2005. Brown has held solo exhibitions at Reyes | Finn, Detroit; Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Jackie Klempay, Brooklyn; Cave, Detroit; and 56 Henry, New York. She was included in a group show at We Buy Gold in Brooklyn in 2017. Brown’s work has been featured in Classic Beauty: 21st-Century Artists on Ancient [Greek] Form at Providence College, and Readymades Belong to Everyone: Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen at the Swiss Institute. Brown is currently on faculty at NYU and was a 2018 resident at Ox-Bow School of Art. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artforum and Contemporary Art Daily.
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Hubert Schmalix
In Schmalix paintings, color is not only surface, but appears as perspective also. His pictures do not aim to imitate nature, but to create structural equivalence. The geometry of cityscapes from Los Angeles, where the artist lives, is not only inscribed the flatness of supervision, but also the fragmented light effects that decompose every order. Supervision and the associated distance are only the starting point for the spatial effect of the house roofs, which always seem to reflect Californian light, as Paul Klee did with Egypt's fields.
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With all the poppy colors, Schmalix' pictures have a soothing effect. Not calming alone, because the color balance would have been successful in a long negotiation process. Soothing also because the contour becomes an ornament. Here, Schmalix is not unlike his Austrian ancestors of Art Nouveau. Decoration and its objectification in ornament are manifestations of, speaking with Kant, "free beauty", in whose assessment "the taste judgment is pure". Decorativeness tends to be characterized by a weakening of the center of the image. The image content loses meaning in favor of a rhythm that captures the image as a whole. The ornament is both, essential and unnecessary. Because if I were asked what these paintings are about, I would say top and round, blue and green, red and yellow shapes.
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Hubert Schmalix (b 1952, Austrian) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Vienna. Schmalix can look back on numerous national and international exhibitions as the Biennale in Venice and Sydney, and was recognised recently with a solo show at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Vienna in 2015. Hubert Schmalix helds the Price for Visual Arts of Vienna, and a professorship at the Academy for Visual Arts since 1997, and teached at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA).
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Available works
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A Tree in the Grand Hotel: Various Artists
Past viewing_room