Larissa Fassler
Building Worlds

An Expressive Instant in Painting

The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.

Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.

Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, 1981; lives and works in New York) describes her pictures and drawings as psychological or invented landscapes. Her cliff coasts, river valleys, sunsets, and lush gardens, often framed by abstract patterns, might be the settings of fairy tales or scenes from paradise. As the New Yorker put it, the paintings “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.” Wielding oil paint, brushes, spatulas, and spray cans, the artist celebrates painting itself, not infrequently quoting the masters of past eras.

Shara Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her most recent solo exhibitions are currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. In 2021, she had shows at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Garden Museum, London; the Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.

In recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.

Contemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment

“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.

Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.

The Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut

The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.

Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.