States of Matter (016)

Andersen's Contemporary is pleased to announce the first solo show “States of Matter” by Daniel Lergon (born 1978, living in Berlin) in our Berlin venue near Hamburger Bahnhof. Lergon’s work can be understood in general as a picturesque discussion of the interaction between light and surface. In the past, he has used a number of textile materials, pigments and varnishes within the scope of his work. At the foreground of this exhibition will be the retro-reflection and refraction of light within the optical categories. Lergon will show four works. The paintings, measuring 400 x 720 cm each, are painted with colorless, watered-down varnish on retro-reflective fabric, which is characterized by reflecting light back to the direction from which it comes. The work formulates for the first time the idea of the Eigenraum (eigenspace) – a concept that has been of concern to the artist for some time. This concept calls on a three-dimensional, visual field in front of the picture – the space the viewer crosses – and, on the other hand, the picture appearance induced by painting or the imaginative space generated by the viewer. In the example of the retroreflective paintings, the concept is readily visualized because the material strongly interacts with the descending light. The space in front of the picture, the movement of the viewer, as well as the given light, are thematized at one and the same time – thus the simultaneously originating eigenspace is defined. Painting originates here as the result of the interaction between material, movement and idea. The exhibition’s title “States of Matter” directs the look at what defines form and status. Lergon understands the known physical states, as well as the classical Greek view of the four elements, as subtext to this exhibition. Above all, he is interested in the different, characteristic states of his paintings and in the accompanying eigenspaces. The work points at the metaphoric potential of the transformation of states in the devolved sense on transition and change. These contents are realized according to two parameters: density and movement. This means the surface density and the consistency of the clear varnish, as well as the paintbrush dynamism or body movement while painting, results in four works with differing eigenspaces. They give to the moving viewer the opportunity to trace the transformation of a state from one into the other, as an aim or a metaphor. In the project space, we are happy to present the exhibition “Flares (A military Countermeasure)” by Thomas Baldischwyler (born 1974, living in Hamburg). Baldischwyler’s work isn’t constricted to a specific medium; he works as an artist, musician, and author. In reverse glass paintings (verre églomisé), installations, texts, collage and music, he interweaves art history, natural sciences and pop culture. Out of an interest in the obscure and the ambiguous, in half-knowledge and speculation, he develops complex visual worlds that always reflect the informative value of art itself. Based on historical points of reference (in this case, the verre églomisé technique as a 17th-century folk art, as well as the collage technique), he develops his own aesthetic and lends this historical, autodidactic art a new context by linking the content-related level with the material one and transferring both to contemporary art. Semi-scientific texts, which accompany the exhibitions and to which pictures and historical references are occasionally added in an art-historical manner, create a link between the elements of his shows that remains unclear yet indisputable. For the project space, Baldischwyler is referring to flares and countermeasures. He started to transfer these flares in the manner of 1920s Art Deco, 1970s batik or the Rorschach ink blot pictures. But the historical or present evidences invite one to start think further, bringing together more and more material and formal layers into something artistically reformed.