We are pleased to present the solo exhibition Showroom Berlin by Marco Reichert, Julian Schnabel, Maya Hayuk and Cali Thornhill-Dewitt. The artists show works from their past and current creative process.
It is certainly a challenge to be a painter today. How can you really become modern with such a traditional language, one frequently accused of being superseded or without having the ability to communicate something? Through his recent work Marco Reichert appears to give us a valid answer: he offers the public the possibility of thinking of a new future for painting, one that does not forget the past and yet is able to capture the potentiality offered by contemporary technology. The works by Marco Reichert are pictorial planes that regain their verticality only at the end of the creative process, and they bring to mind horizontal surfaces destined to host objects and to collect the traces of their passage as well as to record the classical gestures of the “painter”.
Each painting is planned, but it is also unpredictable. This is because it develops during the very course of the work, and each image is intrinsically tied to the elements utilised. The vast range of materials and tools involved leads to new structures, new textures, and new colours which could not have been arrived at without having passed through these pictorial mechanisms.
Besides this, what is of primary importance is the action that the “painting machines”, programmed by the artist himself, exert on the work. Planned at first as “robots” that followed a geometric path and rules in order to interact constantly with them, these devices have today become more complex, and they are for the artist a genuine tool, on the same level as brushes, ones capable of obtaining certain visual results. This is certainly a strange way of painting and it adds something to the final visual effect, one that cannot be separated from the creative imagination of its programmer. –– Maria Villa
Marco Reichert (*1979 in Berlin) studied Fine Art at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin.
Schnabel’s work has been exhibited all over the world. His paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are included in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
In 1996 Schnabel wrote and directed the feature film Basquiat about fellow New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film was in the official selection of the 1996 Venice Film Festival. Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, based on the life of the late exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Coppa Volpi for best actor, Javier Bardem, at the 2000 Venice Film Festival. In 2007 Schnabel directed his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Schnabel received the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards, where the film won Best Film in a Foreign Language. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Oscars. That same year, 2007, he made a film of Lou Reed’s Berlin concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. His most recent film, Miral, won the UNESCO as well as the UNICEF award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. Miral was shown at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations.
Julian Schnabel (*1951 in New York City) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1973. Following his graduation, he applied to the Whitney Independent Study Program; his application consisted of six slides sandwiched between two pieces of bread. He was accepted and graduated from the program in 1974. His first solo painting exhibition took place at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City in February 1979. He currently lives and works in New York City and Montauk, Long Island.
In 2002 Yeo’s photorealist paintings for Theo Fennell were pulled from US magazines for their graphic nudity. The next year he caused uproar at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters by showcasing a full frontal nude painting of Ivan Massow.
Despite this, HRH Queen Elizabeth II requested Yeo to paint a portrait of leading BBC broadcaster David Attenborough for The Royal Collection. In 2007, after a Presidential commission was cancelled, Yeo created a collage of George W Bush made entirely from pornographic magazine cuttings, which garnered international acclaim and controversy in equal measure. The National Portrait Gallery, London describes Yeo’s work as a combination of “photographic realism and a painterly touch.” Dennis Hopper described it as “timeless and exquisite”. Yeo’s work has been honoured with a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, London in Autumn 2013.
Jonathan Yeo (*1970 in London) lives and works in London.
Filmmaker and Neo-expressionist artist Julian Schnabel’s large-scale paintings are materially and thematically monumental, drawing on a wealth of influences from Cubism to the practice of Cy Twombly and themes such as sexuality, obsession, suffering, redemption, death, and belief. Crowded with paint drips, dynamic brushstrokes, and found materials including broken plates, textiles, tarpaulins, and velvet, many of Schnabel’s paintings combine painting and collage techniques. Of his many portraits, perhaps the best known is the oil on velvet Portrait of Andy Warhol (1982), in which the almost translucent subject shares the canvas with a Pollock-esque splatter of paint.
André Saraiva, also known as Monsieur André or Monsieur A, is a French graffiti artist. Born as son of Portuguese parents in Uppsala, Sweden, he has been living in Paris since his childhood. Saraiva started doing graffiti in 1985, quickly acquiring notoriety in the late 90s with Mr. A, a cartoonish character with a top hat, big smile, long legs, and a cross and circle for his eyes that could be found all over the streets of Paris. A famous member of the early Parisian graffiti scene alongside Invader and Zevs, he also made an appearance in Banksy’s street art movie ‘Exit through the Giftshop’.
Thanks to his distinctive poetic and joyful style and his use of pink colour, he became instantly recognizable – for example in his Love Graffiti series, which he created in the year 2000 – and expanded into various techniques such as wall paintings and sculpture from there. Even installations now count to his repertoire as seen in ‘Art in the Streets’, exhibited at the MOCA in Los Angeles that was curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Aaron Rose.
André Saraiva (*1971 Uppsala) lives and works in Paris and New York
Frank “Shepard Fairey” is a very famous graphic artist, muralist, and overall artist. He was born on February 15, 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina in the United States. In 1988, the artist graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy in Palm Springs, California. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 1992.
Shepard Fairey is one of the most influential street artist of our time. Shepard Fairey’s work has been used in screen-prints, stencils, stickers, masking film illustrations, wheat paste, collages, sculptures, posters, paintings, and murals. Shepard Fairey enjoys working with the colors black, white, and red. Fairey has constantly shifted between the realms of fine art, commercial art, street art, and even political art.
Shepard Fairey currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California in the United States.
