Parallel to Gallery Weekend 2022, Circle Culture Gallery presents an international group show including Aron Barath, Jeffrey Cheung, Caroline Denervaud, Alex Giles, Lennart Grau, Beatriz Morales, Anna Nezhnaya, Carsten Beck Nielsen, Marco Reichert, and Aaron Rose.
Artists
Aron Barath, born in 1980 in Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia, is a Hungarian painter living and working in Budapest, Hungary. Barath is best known for his abstract paintings, marked by colour and the seductive qualities of paint as a substance.
Art historian and art critic Rona Kopeczky describes the artist as a chromatogologue and a chromatophone, handing over his place in a noble manner to the colour. The colour dictates the gesture of the artist, freeing itself from contemporary visual culture or communicational trends. What is left is pure, genuine and truthful. Light, substance and colour.
Aron Barath has had group and solo shows predominately in his home country Hungary. However, the past three years his work has been noticed and lauded internationally, resulting in exhibitions in Warsaw, Poland; Miami, the United States of America; Vienna, Austria and now also in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Jeffrey Cheung is a Bay Area based artist, who is the co-founder of Unity Press and Unity Skateboarding. Cheung’s bright figurative work celebrates queerness within his personal life and within skate culture. He is a prolific maker, whose vivacious art examines freedom, identity, and intersectionality, through bold colour and intertwined characters. Cheung’s figures stem from his queer zine making practice and have grown into larger than life paintings. His genderless body positive world questions the boundaries of sexuality, body, gender, and race. Cheung’s simplistic line-work of gender nonspecific bodies offers a clever yet loving response to the heteronormative gaze creating a more inclusive and accessible entry point.
Swiss visual and performance artist Caroline Denervaud currently lives in Paris, where she creates abstract and expressive works through painting, film and photographic stills.
Caroline’s performance-based art reflects her studies in dance at the Laban Center in London and Fine Arts in Paris at Studio Bercot. Mimicking the natural curves and motions of her body, Caroline describes her work as a play of connection, conversations and feeling. Caroline’s work is also concerned with how colours meet and interact, guided by instinct emotion, music and interplay between balance and imbalance.
Caroline’s explorative works have led her to esteemed collaborations between fashion house Roksanada in London Fashion Week, Hotel Les Roches Rouge and most recently, the rose-coloured Roksanda Penthouse.
Alex Giles: “My work has no expectation on the viewer but to switch the intellect off and dive in. We are living in an era where it has become important to take the opportunity to escape. I want my audience to succumb to the joy of shape and colour and be immersed in an overwhelming visual experience. Each work is a snapshot of my own internal visual escapism. Whether I go looking for it, or it happens involuntarily such as in the gaps between consciousness and sleep. The snapshots are then processed and sharpened so that they become advertisements for the three stages of semi-conscious visual exploration: Chaotic and elemental. Journey and progress. Destination and symmetry.”
Lennart Grau’s almost brutal use of colours is a fascinating counterpoint in his interest in the ease and jauntiness of the Rokoko. Impressed by the human ability of decadence, as particularly embodied by this former society, the artist feels inspired to emphasize tawdry themes. For Grau, angels, classic still lifes and epic stagings represent perfect models to reveal the shallow glamour of this era and to shape these typical ornaments into neat ulcers. In reduced, abstract studies, in which the artists deals with the effect of real and painted light and shadow, Grau is always in search of innovative techniques of the Trompe L’oeil. With these moments of irritation, the painter attempts to engender mistrust on behalf of the beholder that on the one hand is seductive, but on the other hand also contains a doubtful undertone. As in Impressionism, the representation of light and ambient conditions becomes the artist’s key task. An art movement that, even back then, has always been connected with innovation, progress and critical thinking, is revived by the work of Lennart Grau and transformed into a three-dimensional image. Lennart has completed his studies of fine arts as an alumni of Prof Leiko Ikemura at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 2012.
“I like being seduced by beautiful fascades which at the same time make me question them immediately because of their superficial aesthetic.“
Lennart Grau (*1981 in Krefeld/Germany) lives and works in Berlin.
Beatriz Morales’ multi-layered aesthetic is deeply informed by her Mexican and Lebanese heritage as well as her life and work between Berlin and Mexico City. She explores questions of identity – personal and societal – on small to medium size canvases like her ongoing series Sounds I’ll Never Hear, Ruin Porn (represented here as an Untitled series of work) and new works from the cycle Atmospheres, as well as large to monumentally sized installation pieces, often presented in natural contexts.
Morales experienced a steep increase of interest in her work following several institutional exhibitions in Mexico, notably a monumental 750 m2 installation KAAN / KIHAAB (2021) at the Museo MACAY in Mérida, Yucatán and a solo exhibition at the Chancellery Museum in Mexico City (2020).
Anna Nezhnaya (Moscow, 1987) lives and works in Berlin since 2016. With her background as a trained graphical artist from the Moscow State University for Printing Arts and Graphics, Anna explores traditional images in contemporary settings. For Anna, digital drawing is the perfect connection to light art, serving as studies for her neon sculptures. Light plays a major role in her works as she is developing experimental ways to create surface structure with new painting techniques. She reflects on the topic of grotesque feminism, exploring images of femaleness in terms of mysticism and metaphor.
Carsten Beck Nielsen is a visual artist, who was born in Denmark, like other prominent artists such as Bonazza Luigi, Nick Payne, Ahmad Siyar Qasimi, Lene Winther, and Johnny Otto.
The paintings are a mix of a geometric perspective in forms and shapes with a mathematicians attention to detail and high quality materials. The lines in his paintings creates a new object and a new formation that immediately fascinates and guides you to find comfort and relaxation. Carsten tells us: “The ideas behind my work, is an expression of the organic forms and shapes. My background into print making and photography gives me the options to see a new perspective in art. The simple lines that create a new object fascinates me, and force me to think of art in a new way through the simple lines. My big passion and inspiration for midcentury modern art, is something I feel a deep-rooted connection with”.
The works of the Berlin artist Marco Reichert are abstract and yet still have a figurative character. One might suspect an abstracted face or a fingerprint behind the forms consisting of many individual lines in the center of the picture. This phenomenon is called pareidolia and results from unconscious or conscious misinterpretations of the human brain, which try to complete seemingly incomplete structures and assimilate them to familiar forms. The effect can be perceived by several people at the same time. However, Marco Reichert is not interested in the figurative image, but focuses on the construction of different surfaces. The origin of his works is not exclusively painterly, as there is a technical aspect, especially the field of computer science. In this way, the artist creates a link between different focal points, since Marco Reichert began studying computer science in 2001, but switched to art studies in 2004. Reichert uses the LIDAR technology of his smartphone to scan surfaces, such as that of a forest floor, to capture its organic structures. The scanner emits light beams that are invisible to the human eye in a grid of points and simultaneously records the reflections, making it possible to create a 3D model with depth information. With the help of a self-programmed computer program, the artist creates from the graphic a map with hundreds of thousands of points in coordinates, which a robot can traverse in two axes. The program has no artificial intelligence, but only calculates the path that the machine should follow. The paint is applied to a canvas already painted by Reichert by means of a painting tool constructed by the artist. In contrast to the drawing machines of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), which were first created in 1955, in Marco Reichert’s work the actual work is not the apparatus, but the painting created by it. Through the process of transferring several layers onto the painting surface, different structures are created on the surface which build on each other, this leads to the machine making mistakes when drawing the lines. Gaps appear or the diameter of the contour is irregular. These errors are intended by Marco Reichert, as the machine process thereby appears more natural and the overall picture more organic. The machine is meant to surprise the artist – failure is seen as an opportunity for further development. If the result were perfect once, there would be no reason to repeat the process or even create a series from it. Even with the intention of duplicating a map, the result would be different, since the variable of the error quotient always leads to deviations in the lines, thus creating a unique character. However, Reichert deletes all digital information of a work after its completion, so that no duplicate can be created. The individual lines do not take up much surface area on the canvas, but that is precisely why the optical impression as a whole unit is all the greater. Marco Reichert also refers to these as Destroylines, a term from the graffiti scene referring to the destruction of a picture by long drawn-through lines. In fact, a destructive process also takes place on the canvas via the machine. In the rare case, the artist must intervene and work calmly against the chaos. Finally, Reichert paints over the work with coarse and expressive brushstrokes or with fine strokes specifically in some places with a contrasting color, so that above the machine product still stands the artist’s handwriting.
Aaron Rose is an artist who is well known as one of the cornerstones of the modern urban art movement. For ten years he was owner/director of the Alleged Gallery in New York. In 2006, Rose was co-curator of the museum exhibition Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture which toured the world through 2009. Rose was also director of the feature documentary film Beautiful Losers (Arthouse Films/Oscilloscope). In 2011 he co-curated (with Roger Gastman and Jeffrey Deitch) a large-scale exhibition titled “Art In The Streets”, which opened to record crowds at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Rose is represented as a director by the Los Angeles production company, who also represents Mike Mills, Patrick Daughters and Sofia Coppola. His publishing imprint, Alleged Press releases hardcover books by contemporary artists including Ari Marcopoulos, Ed Templeton, Mike Mills, Barry McGee and Chris Johanson. Rose is also co-editor of ANP Quarterly, an arts and culture magazine published by skate/surf brand RVCA. Besides, he is the founder of Make Something!!, a nationwide art education program for teens which partners world-renowned creative personalities with young aspiring artists.
Aaron Rose believes that life is nothing more than a dictionary of symbols: “We look to symbols everywhere to help us make sense of our existence. From the mundane to the mystical symbols are totems that give order to the chaos and also help define ourselves as a tribe.“ From his very first works, symbology has always played a major role. However, rather then use symbols for their intended significance, Aaron Rose always preferred to recontextualize meanings in unexpected ways – creating abstract visuals composed of symbols invented and culled from the annals of visual history. Typography and hand-lettering has also played a big role in his work. While living in New York in his early twenties, Rose supplemented his income working as a sign painter on the Lower East Side. The artist’s current series of works takes this a step further. The abstraction of symbols has been pushed a step further to create figurative portraits.
Aaron Rose (*1969 Portland Oregon) lives and works in Los Angeles.
