ART CITIES:Berlin-Blair Thurman
Blair Thurman’s influences range from Pop art and Minimalism to relics from childhood, popular music, and 1970s cinema. His standardized forms, pulled from slot-car racetracks, architectural frameworks, and found shapes from daily life, comprise a personal iconography, the fascinations of boyhood working to render the subliminal realm of abstract geometries more idiosyncratic and accessible.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Peres Projects Archive
Thurman refers to the style and significance of his work as its “signature-content” as he investigates the intersection between our cultural environment and our imagined fantasies, examining the memory and poetry embedded in the very act of looking. Blair Thurman presents his solo exhibition “Exquisite Course” at Peres Projects in Berlin. Blair Thurman in his forms combines his personal iconography and his passionate collecting of model cars with an acute awareness of the inherent challenges of painting, resulting in a Pop-Minimalist sensibility infused with tribal patterns and American car culture. His shaped canvases exist on the periphery of both painting and sculpture simultaneously. As the artist says about his work “One thing about my work is that I always try to make it about me. I try to make it personal, make it my own and connect it to my past”. Thurman’s work is evidence to the evolution of Abstraction in the ‘80s and its context, through a double dynamic, both opening the pictorial and symbolic field and distancing itself from ‘60–70s Abstraction and Minimalism. Thurman’s abstract work is in line with his visual take on the senses that originated in the theory of vibrations. Just like sound, the light spectrum emits waves that the artist observes in nature and translates subjectively in his work. “Life is characterised by vibration. Without vibration, there is no life. The world in its entirety obeys this law. As individuals, we form complete entities, our organisms are operated by a single engine and this engine’s degree of sophistication determines how much we can vibrate, and therefore feel”. In car culture, as a part of the contemporary world, Thurman found a formal, living and vibrant form of purity. Although abstraction is based on reality, it simultaneously recodes reality using simple forms. This subjectivity manifested in Thurman’s work is also reflected through his titles, often linked to personal facts, movie references or puns. Thurman’s work owes as much to his command of a broad range of media as to subconscious influences. Parallel to, and sometimes in combination with his paintings, he has transposed his signature imagery into neon. Thurman deftly employs the intrinsic associations of neon, from bar signage to Minimalist and Conceptual art, to free his diverse appropriations from their original contexts, shaking up the disparate visual fragments and recreating them in bright light.
Info: Peres Projects, Karl-Marx-Allee 82, Berlin, Duration: 16/11-21/12/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com
