Circle Culture Gallery is proud to introduce 15 positions of contemporary art including painting, sculpture, works on paper and video installation.
When encountering with a piece of contemporary art, a strong effect can frequently be predominant: There is something happening between the artwork and its beholder. An inexplicable sensation is evoked, which cannot be verified by classical scientific research. Inanimate objects like a canvas and color pigments, a piece of bronze, a video or graphite on paper seem to have been stimulated and start to communicate with their observer, as if a powerful human trace was inherent. It leads to a certain vibe or radiation – which might be determined as the core character of every good work of art. Sensing this radiation lets the viewer immerse deeply into the artwork and allow him or her to discover a further conceptual level behind the formal one. By emphasizing and provoking that interaction between artwork and recipient, RADIATE intends to explore and intensify the specific human experience with art.
The exhibition displays artworks from all over the world and from various categories. The wide range of works intends the demonstration of meta energies injected by each artist in his or her very own way: Johnny Abrahams’ works explore the illusory nature of repetition. His Op Art related vibrant paintings are based on a fixed process: beginning with the division of space into increasingly intricate geometries, the American painter forms a progressively finer language of elements. By replicating and overlaying the initial visual language, he generates a pattern of interference, a composition of artifacts and secondary images, which becomes the subject of his paintings. Even though the process is always the same, there is not a fixed outcome. In this way the work attempts to represent the idea that repetition does not exist, that even if something in every technical sense is identical, the mind perceives it changes from moment to moment. Abrahams’ works thus address the notion that beyond mechanics and materials, beyond composition and context, it is the mind that constitutes the perception of these elements. Lauren Seiden explores the essential elements of process and materiality through an intuitive and intimate layering of graphite: In her paper based works, she tests the conventions of drawing by breaking down the surface and transforming the paper into a physical, textural and structural form. Situating it not as a medium of preparation or provision, but as a final form, the works are displayed on wooden strecher bars, thus moving beyond the limits inherent in the material and further expanding upon the notion of drawing as painting and painting as sculpture. The act of folding the paper strengthens its structure while weakening the surface, allowing for necessary manipulation of the material in order to maintain stability – an equilibrium of loss and gain within the transformation. These dualties of strength and fragility are encapsulated within a process that, like the work itself, strikes a balance between the internal and external. Anthony James’ amorphous sculptures refer to the concept of morphic fields, a hypothesis by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who describes a formative process of transformation and transmission of memories in nature. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s Cardboard series, James saturated and modelled discarded cardboard boxes in wax, to then burn them and finally cast them in bronze. Thus he captures the fragile moment of metamorphosis from one form to another, from solid material to ash. James’ works investigate the concept of transitoriness and memory, they reflect the relationship between our present and the mythologies of the past. American author and art critic Glenn O’Brien about Anthony James: “James works in an aesthetic and metaphysical sense. He creates the totems of our present and thus improvises the omens of a possible future.”
Besides these exemplary works, further unique positions, such as spiritual art by a Zen Monch, strongly meditative minimal pieces or powerful large scale paintings will introduce the viewer to expose him/herself to the radiation of art and guide to each one’s individual perception.
RADIATE will travel the cosms of each artwork by focussing on its meta aspects – the feelable but yet inexplicable.
