Tamara Suhr
Skulpturen

Ein Spiel mit den Ambivalenzen

Offenkundig Mythologisches gerät bei Gerhard Neumaier (geb. 1950 in Freiburg, lebt und arbeitet in Baden-Baden) ebenso zur trivialen Episode, wie scheinbar Triviales legendäre Ikonik entfaltet. Dabei bricht sein unvoreingenommener Umgang mit Klassikern wie etwa in der Duchamp-Persiflage „Hokuspokus mit Fokus Lokus“ semantische Vorurteile in den Sehgewohnheiten auf und bietet dem Betrachter neuartige Interpretationen. In der perfomativen Bewegtheit seiner Rakelbilder legt er eine haptische Sinnlichkeit an den Tag, die Cora von Pape in ihrer Einleitung dazu bringt, den Künstler zu zitieren: „Ich male, was ich weiß, damit ich sehe, was ich fühle.“

The Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years

For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.

Boisterous Compositions

At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.

Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.