Group Show, Second Nature

Groen Kwartier

The exhibition presents works by three artists based in Berlin - a German painter, Julian Fickler, a Swedish sculptor, Sofia Hultén and an American painter, Sara Sizer. All of them are interested in processes of transformation and, seemingly non-chalantly, working with common materials. By revealing or focusing on nuances and details like a surface, a brushstroke or a specific way something is put togehter their work not only offers a clearer essence of the original but opens up new considerations on the given as well. The works are inspired by a predisposition of a given material - and the question of what it could be or has been. As a conceptual framework for her paintings and drawings Sara Sizer adds nothing to the simple classic construct of a wooden frame stretched with fabric. No paint lies on the surface of the paintings and no pencil delineates shapes. Rather by removing she manages to create images. The paintings are made by bleaching the existing color in varying degrees from colored velvet and then manipulating the stretching of the fabric to imbue the works with added meaning. In these canvases Sizer captures fleeting moments of shadow and light as if the fabric were light sensitive. Sometimes her works appear hyperreal, sometimes barely descriptive. The processes of removal create pictures that resonate emotional after images but at the same time they become so tactile as to be totally there. Sofia Hultén makes dimensional leaps using objects often literally found on the street. Grubby and familiar, her materials reveal hidden potentialities in alternative realities and parallel possibilities. In her sculpture, video and photo series, Hultén examines the material world as an extension of the lived-in mind. She considers not only the current state of objects but also their past and future. They usually appear as fragments of a larger frame of activity, similar to a single aspect of an overarching storyline. Some of her sculptures can be seen as humorous speculations on the geometrical shifts within objects changing from the third to the fourth dimension while in many of her recent video works the element of time constitutes a matrix for an understanding and interpretation of the 4-dimension. Julian Fickler has worked for some years on large paintings with many layers of very thin acrylic paint. These monochrome canvases captured the energetic and messy process of their making and at the same time offered very subtle nuances of color shifts on their surfaces. In his most recent paintings Fickler works with found objects like scraps of cardboard which are used to print subtle black or grey marks on primed white canvases. With a minimum of means Fickler generates something like a visualization of DNA which could be endlessly repeated. At the same time each canvas seems to test the limits of a composition interested in conveying emotional content through a balanced but never fully controlled process of mark making.

Represented artists