LAYERED LANDSCAPES

Artists: Mark Dorf (US), Alexandra Gorczynski (US), Joe Hamilton (AUS), Han Bing (CHN), Michelle Jezierski (DE), Daecheon Lee (KOR/DE)

Curated by: Tina Sauerländer, peer to space (DE)

Location: Philine Cremer Gallery, Ackerstraße 23, Düsseldorf, Germany

Opening & Artist Talk: September 2, 2016, 6 p.m.

With Mark Dorf, Michelle Jezierski, Daecheon Lee and curator Tina Sauerländer

Duration: September 2 until October 21, 2016

For the DC Open, Gallery owner Philine Cremer has invited the Berlin based curator Tina Sauerländer (peer to space) to curate the group show LAYERED LANDSCAPES. The show will add an international context to the usually Asia-focused gallery program. With artists from Asia, Australia, Europe and the USA the exhibition explores the phenomenon of layers in the digital age in contemporary landscape depictions as a reflection of today’s living conditions.

Windows to different worlds open up on a screen’s surface. Versions of reality overlap. Behind each visible layer another version and another excerpt of reality comes into existence. There are neither pure facts nor absolute truth. The world consists of subjective perceptions and interpretations. In today’s society, these ideas are highly relevant as well as explosive: on the one hand, they reflect an essential structure of life in the digital age, on the other hand—by casting many possible views on one and the same thing—they symbolize openness and tolerance as basic principles of peaceful coexistence in a society.

The perception of reality in layers characterizes life in the digital age. Contemporary artists take up this concept independent of a medium, from traditional painting to GIFs. The exhibition LAYERED LANDSCAPES presents art works which explore the contemporary phenomenon of layers in landscape depictions. Landscape depictions have always been used to express the state of society or to project human wishes and aspirations. These days, landscape depictions reflect human living conditions in the digital age.

Information about the artists:

Michelle Jezierski: For her artworks, Michelle Jezierski uses several photographs from different contexts as a model. During the process of painting, these are translated to canvas where they form a new entity. The artist dissolves real spaces with layers and fractions (like geometric elements or line structures) to differently reconstruct the photographic landscapes.

Joe Hamilton: Joe Hamilton’s digital collages are layered compositions of his own images and found materials on the Internet. He merges online and offline imagery of different textures like surfaces of rocks, water or leaves, brushstrokes or monochrome layers, provoking a clash of associations for the viewer. The artist “explores the space between our shared sense of history and our experience of the world today.“ 

Alexandra Gorczynski: In her Landscape Paintings, a fivepart series of websites, Alexandra Gorczynski replaces „brush strokes and canvases with layers of painterly lines, images, and animations“ (Lindsay Howard). Inspired by the Chateau de Versailles, the artist layers fragments from the past and from nature in digital present technology. Sound plays an important role, as it surrounds the viewer and further drags him into the world of the artwork.  

Daecheon Lee: From the distance, Daecheon Lee’s paintings seem to be abstract. At close range they unfold a manifold simultaneous depiction of human existence. The encounter of nature and civilization forms one of the main subjects and interests of the artist. His recent works emerge against the backdrop of a global society that increasingly resorts to extreme and violence.

Mark Dorf: In his series Emergence artist Mark Dorf deals with landscape depiction between post-analog photography and digital media. By embedding photographs he took in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in further digital layers, the artist explores contemporary means of representation of nature between the sublime, science and technology.

Han Bing: In the analog, single-exposure photographs of her series Urban Amber, the artist Han Bing mirrors Beijing’s buildings in the ubiquitous dirty rivers full of garbage and industrial waste. In China, amber is considered a valuable. In the artist’s works it symbolizes China's desire for  modernity and the dream of middle-class families for a better life that in reality often dissolves into urban poor living instead.

Exhibition on ArteFuse, aqnb.

EXHIBITION VIEWS (all images courtesy Philine Cremer Gallery, Düsseldorf, 2016)