POSITIONS BERLIN ART FAIR 2022 - Booth A07
In the iconic Tempelhof airport - Hangar 5 & 6
Eva Steynen proposes a group show with four artists the gallery works with:
CHRISTINE CLINKX (black&white analog photography)
ROBERT SOROKO (sculptures)
JOHANNES ULRICH KUBIAK (abstract painting)
WANNES LECOMPTE (abstract painting)
SHORT PRESENTATION OF THE ARTISTS
CHRISTINE CLINCKX
° 1969 B, lives and works in Antwerp)
Multimedia artist, performer and activist Christine Clinckx combines actuality and history in her installations and photographic work. Her photographic prints are made with an early 20th-century large-format camera obscura using a 19th-century wet-plate collodion process. In Art Rotterdam she shows a series of photograms on light-sensitive paper and printed on metal.
The works are part of an ongoing project based on a combination of found landscape photographs and family pictures. By cutting these images up and then manipulating them, their original meaning and function are disturbed and transformed, with ghost-like figures haunting landscapes of the past.
Clinckx combines historic and contemporary photographic techniques, giving rise to serendipitous and evocative imperfections - streaks, scratches, spots, and pits that estrange the original subject.
Clinckx' work shows how the past continuously penetrates the present and how we relate to this interaction amongst contemporary events and personal experiences, combining anonymous historical sources of familial relationships with private autobiographical narratives and critical engagement. Referring both literally and figuratively to the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history and memory.
Christine Clinckx studied at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts Antwerp (1989 - 1992). Since then her work was on view in numerous exhibitions national and international. She had recently a solo show at the gallery, opening during Antwerp Art Weekend, May 2022.
ROBERT SOROKO
°1990 (B) lives and works in Antwerpen (BE)
Robert Soroko searches for possibilities to keep his sculptures mobile. By wind or by hand they move very subtile, almost invisible. Hard materials like metal he gives form, they show a captured movement, as if the welding has suddenly stopped. Although they are robust they show a purified simple line. Combining wood with iron. Or steel figures that come in clear basic colours. Making a different intervention depending on the material and space. They recall to figures out of old cultures, their slow elegant movements inspired by Tai-Chi, organic figures that seem walking out of another world.
JOHANNES ULRICH KUBIAK
°1961 Annaberg-Buchholz (D), lives and works since 1981 in Berlin (D), since 2018 in Antwerp (B)
Over the past 30 years, Johannes Ulrich Kubiak has engaged in a process of experimentation with a variety of media in order to research depth, colour and structure. His work challenges and intertwines traditional genres and techniques in painting, drawing and photography informed by shifts in contemporary digital media.
In his drive to explore different media and investigate what lies beneath the surface, Kubiak's work shifted from 1992 – 2002 from painting to photography. For ten years, he worked together with Ludwig Rauch in the artistic collaborative of Kubiak & Rauch. Similar to his pursuits in painting, he explored transparency of layers and the use of different supports in the photographic process.
This quality of transparency and visibility of process are apparent in Kubiak's paintings and aquarelles. The basis of these paintings are underlying structures distilled from photographs and sketches from his travels and urban wanderings. Throughout this body of work, the figure seems to disintegrate under the surface of the composition, revealing every single brush stroke, placed side-by-side or layered one over the other, disrupting and creating new relations of colour.
Whilst he works on them, the paintings lie flat, opening potential spaces that omit awareness of above and below. Through intense concentration and a painstaking process, figures emerge out of variated structures of vibrant colour.
J.U.Kubiak has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, U.S., Austria, France, Belgium. His work is held in several collections, incl., Deutsche Bank, Bundesbank, Kunstsammlung Sachsen, Berlinische Galerie.
WANNES LECOMPTE
°1979 (B), lives and works in Brussels
The painting wants to be a painting! For almost twenty years this is Wannes Lecompte's credo, celebrating the act of painting itself. And how he does! His oil on canvas is more than composition of color, texture and rhythm. Lecompte convoking and provoking chance, in a voluntary slow process, waits in front of the empty canvas until the painting presents itself. His interlacing brushstrokes mingle, one color over the other, packed together and surrounded by the white emptiness of the canvas.
Without trying to present a figure, Lecompte his scriptural paintings reveal slowly their poetic composition. Arrangements of density enforced by the emptiness around, compositions as well of sonorities as it is of silences. They show an intensity of the instant, that one unique moment, simultaneously slowing down and revealing the 'drums' of our times.
Wannes Lecompte holds a Master's degree in fine arts (2005, Sint-Lucas, Antwerpen) and studied painting in Sint Lucas, Ghent and Künsthochschule Weissensee (Berlin). His work is exhibited since 2003 in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.