LOOK&LISTEN: avril 2012

(b. 1977) lives and works in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.
"The seductive attraction of the painting lies in their extrovertly taciturn quality, and by the way in which the gutsy, even aggressive application of colour is countered by the sensitive, even delicately tentative, scoring of the paint in all its precise and potent hues. Rare is it to see paint being worked so sensually and yet often so brutally. The juicy colours push and pull, and the eye is caught in an impossible impasse - are we gazing onto boundless unlimited and infinite space, or are we peering into claustrophobically constraining, sealed and hermetic compartments from which nothing can leak? Can we simultaneously do both?Ní Mhaonaigh's involved and tactile approach - with its implications of cathartic release and metaphysical intensity - generates images that, packed and agitated as they are, ultimately function as investigations into the sublime, Kant split his concept of the sublime into three categories, the petrifying sublime, sometimes accompanied with a certain dread or melancholy; the noble sublime inspiring quiet wonder; the splendid sublime, pervaded with beauty. One need only gaze at Ní Mhaonaigh's paintings - packed complex, luxurious, transfixing - to see a simultaneous evocation of not one but all these facets of the sublime, held perpetually in tension and in unison."

http://www.kevinkavanaghgallery.ie/Artists.aspx

- Pádric E. Moore, extract from; Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh (2010)

Touching Relating Dividing / New works by Thomas Müller

Opening: Tuesday 17th April 2012 6-9pm

Exhibition dates: 18th April to 19th May 2012

Thomas Müller, Untitled, Ballpoint and Indian ink on Arches paper, 160 x 115 cm, 2012

Touching Relating Dividing, Thomas Müller at Patrick Heide CA

Photo by Marcus Leith

Touching Relating Dividing, Thomas Müller at Patrick Heide CA

Photo by Marcus Leith

Touching Relating Dividing, Thomas Müller at Patrick Heide CA

Photo by Marcus Leith

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present ‘Touching Relating Dividing’, the second solo exhibition in London of German artist Thomas Müller. ‘Touching Relating Dividing’ will feature an installation of recent drawings, hung in the usual open grid manner, and 3 large-scale works on paper.

The title of the exhibition derives from the title of Müller’s latest catalogue, published by the Centre for Recent Drawing in London together with Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in 2011. The catalogue concentrates on the variety, process and essential qualities of the German artist’s drawing practice and will be available at the opening and throughout the exhibition.

Since the mid 90ties Müller has worked exclusively with the medium of drawing, exploring an endless spectrum of media and motives where no routine is allowed. Always non figurative, each drawing is a renewed and fresh exploration into process, composition and material.

Blue and purple ballpoint pen drawings of dense thin parallel lines are created next to drawings with lines and loose grids in green and violet oil or marks and spots in Indian ink. Motifs of organic weaving in black crayon are opposed to almost imperceptible doodles in graphite or colour pencil.

All works are nevertheless linked in spirit and interact with each other in spite of their variety. Müller’s typical installation method, rows of A4 drawings hung in open and broken groupings of always the same distance, allows the eye to wander and underlines the connections between the drawings but also brings out new aspects amongst the works. As Patrick Heide states in the accompanying invitation text: “Müller understands (like very few artists) how to let drawing develop in any direction, where the next drawing can be the missing type, yet capture its essence at the same time.”

In ‘Touching Relating Dividing’, an installation of A4 drawings will map out a good part of the main gallery space downstairs, covering it from floor to ceiling.

Yet Müller has always been engaging with larger surfaces as well, and has demonstrated his talent and ability on this scale. Three drawings of even larger format than in the last London exhibition will be presented, amongst them an enormous blue ballpoint pen drawing: realized by placing a caliber formed after a piece of glass on the paper surface, Müller traces its edges to then move the caliber spirally, creating flowing waves that cover the full extent of the paper to an imposing visual impact.

Thomas Müller studied painting and drawing at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Stuttgart as well as German literature at the University of Stuttgart. He had museum exhibitions in Germany, France, Switzerland, USA and Iceland. His drawings are collected internationally and form part of high profile private collections such as the Guerlain collection in Paris or the Frankel collection in the US.

Prominent museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and Stuttgart and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin hold larger numbers of his drawings in their collections.

In 2010 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix de Dessin Contemporain of the Fondation Guerlain.

Thomas Müller lives and works in Stuttgart.

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art

11 Church Street

London NW8 8EE

T +44 (0)2077245548

info@patrickheide.com

www.patrickheide.com

Richard Serra

"The torqued ellipses, spirals, spheres and toruses exist in the polarity between the downward force of gravity, their weightlessness and their upward rise in elevation which attempts to attain a condition of weightlessness.
The sculptures are not objects separated in space but on the contrary they engender the spatial continuum of their environment. They impart from to the entire space, they shape the space through axes trajectories and passages between their solids and voids.

I titled this installation the matter of time because it is based on the idea of multiple or layered temporalities. As one experiences each work in the context of the entirety of the installation one will become aware of the obvious diversity of durations of time.
The meaning of the installation will be activated and animated by the rhythm of the viewer's movement. Meaning occurs only through sontinuous movement, through anticitation, observation and recollection.

However, there is no prescribed view, no preferred sequence, no preferred succession of views. Each person will map the space differently. There is an unlimited range of individual experiences, but they all take place over time.
When I talk about time, i do not mean 'real' time, clock time. The perceptual or aesthetic, emotional or psychological time of the sculptural experience is quite different from 'real' time.
It is non-narrative, discontinuous, fragmented, de-centred, disorienting. "

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Richard%20Serra&page=2&f=People&cr=12