ART CITIES:Paris-Heimo Zobernig
The work of Heimo Zobernig spans an array of media, from architectural intervention and installation, through performance, film and video, to sculpture and painting. His practice across all these forms is connected by an interrogation of the formal language of modernism, at its most familiar in the tropes of the monochrome and the grid, yet also concerned with Constructivism, colour theory and geometric abstraction.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Chantal Crousel Archive
Heimo Zobernig has been working constantly questioning two fundamentals of the 20th Century painting: the grid and the monochrome. Zobernig’s works offer a great variety of approaches with precision and details. In “This New This”, his solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, Heimo Zobernig has put together paintings originating from different series made between 2011 and 2017. All acrylics on canvas measure one by one meter. Presented chronologically, the works show the evolution of Zobernig’s painting over the last six years, testimony of the evolution of his work and the hinge between each series. Each painting marks a transition with the following series of works, result of first considerations for further image motifs. The latter are related to art history devices and text templates from various sources. The 2011 text paintings (blue, white or ochre), with their phantom-like effect in which the pure and minimal form is no longer the privilege of the language, gradually open onto the next series. The mixed up motifs, refer to the previous ones as well as to the following ones. The complex compositions are all combined with large color fields. The pixelated surfaces of the 2014 paintings recall the pixels of low resolution 1980s video screens. The paintings are more about surface than about color. Through their texts, their digital palettes, their coarse pixellation, they affirm their relationship to the moving image in a way which is at once explicit and playfully elusive. Finally, from the more formal grid paintings to the more gestural broken grids and winding paintings, the tape used is cut roughly by hand with words emerging such as: THIS.
Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration 1/12/17-20/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com
