“Das Wunderland fehlte mir”
artists:
Andrea Damp, Maxwell Dunlop, Beate Höing, Petra Rintelen, Arny Schmit
exhibition: July 16th – August 20th 2022
opening reception: July 15th 6-8pm
The janinebeangallery presents from July 16th 2022 the exhibition „Das Wunderland fehlte mir“ (Missing the Wonderland) with paintings by the artists Andrea Damp, Maxwell Dunlop, Petra Rintelen, Arny Schmit and ceramics sculptures by Beate Höing.
In her paintings Andrea Damp subtly maintains a balance between abstraction and figuration.
Her works are created in a sophisticated process of layering and overlapping that makes the sensual process of becoming a picture tangible.
With the use of figurative elements, the painter transforms her compositions into narrative associative pictorial worlds that are characterised by atmosphere and emotional expression.
Andrea Damp’s paintings thus forms an incomparable link between the autonomy of colour and its abilities in the service of the image.
In the paintings of the US artist Maxwell Dunlop, atmospheres of peculiar gravitation meet spaces that both narrate with tension and open up a vast, silent timelessness.
On the one hand, his spaces are vast, open natural landscapes with mountains and skies full of clouds that stretch down into the valleys. On the other hand, Dunlop shows interiors of magnificent halls and representative foyers of a bygone, “classical” era. These interiors, though thoroughly marked by civilisational design and history, nevertheless seem strangely large, deserted and dark as if after their inhabitants had moved out. Human artefacts are placed here in distant perspective, like visiting a museum outside opening hours.
Maxwell Dunlop points out that he does not base his interiors on concrete models, but rather associates set pieces of his memories and ideas. The same applies to his landscapes, whose very personal pictorial compositions adhere to the inner show rather than wanting to repeat the real visit to a place. The “echo”, the reverberation of his paintings, corresponds to the artist’s inner sonar, with which he sounds out and reproduces his socio-cultural and natural experience.
Petra Rintelen‘s paintings are a concentrated look at the existence of life and things. Some of the pictures are reminiscent of myths, dream moments that explore human existence narratively in a bold interweaving of movement and stillness. Petra Rintelen’s still lifes, which balance shadow and light, dark and light in a well thought-out colour composition so that the objects unfold tenderness and power in equal measure, show a no less typical handwriting. The seemingly random is transformed for the viewer into a world of the captured moment. Petra Rintelen’s pictures tell of the spiritual richness of silence.
In Arny Schmit‘s landscapes, the technique already bears witness to disturbances in a very material way. The Luxembourg artist uses, among other things, multi-layered cardboard as a support for his oil paints, which he cuts open at certain points and sometimes provides with a fluorescent tube lying on top. His motifs are thoroughly unidyllic; chaotic vegetation and unbridled, threatening weather predominate. This mood is created and supported by a deconstructive because ablative wiping technique that repeatedly distorts layers of colour and forms and crosses them with previous ones. There is also a strong contrast with the fluorescent tubes mounted across some of the works, which, as the epitome of industry and civilisation, are superimposed on the painted landscape here.
The janinebeangallery juxtaposes painting with the ceramics of Beate Höing.
Inspired by ornaments and materiality as cultural-historical components of folk art, by fairy tales and myths as well as traditions and rituals, these influences appear in the work of the painter and ceramic sculptor Beate Höing in a completely independent iconography. What actually exists, what is associated and what is remembered come together in an ambivalent play of reality and fiction, in which dream and nightmare, relaxation and fright lie close together. Content, materiality and form are inextricably linked.
The ceramic material indirectly conveys the idea of kitsch, but also of traditional craftsmanship. This “mortgage” accommodates the contentual statement and is almost provocatively heightened by the artist. Incorporated knick-knacks and porcelain figurines, for centuries the epitome of bourgeois preferences, loved as decorative items or souvenirs or dismissed as kitsch, offer scope for the imaginary and the fantastic.