Nobuyuki Tanaka
Primordial Memories

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.

An Artist Book Setting New Visual Processes in Motion

Around the year 2009, Horst Keining (b. 1949, Hattingen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) began to create blurred contours with the help of a small spray gun used without stencil. Up to four partially superimposed pictorial planes result in the oscillation and almost three-dimensional pulsation of the pictorial space. In interplay with a contrasting juxtaposition of strongly contoured images, his works convey a completely new visual experience. Since the resulting “blur effect” shrinks due to the reduction, this artist book places an essential accent on the reproduction of image details in their original size, followed by a full image of the picture.

Michael Williams (b. Doylestown, Pa., U.S., 1978; lives and works in Los Angeles, Ca.) is known for paintings whose source materials have been subjected to both analog and digital processes in an effort to render the fragmented nature of our existence today. During the lockdown, he created six large-format collage paintings. To make these modern history paintings, he mounted paper printouts on canvases and reworked the pictures with paint. They are, in short, classic collages, as in the exhilarating days of DADA, when the photographic image from newspapers first transmigrated into art. Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.