Press Release

 

TOSC - (Tendencies of Self-Containment)

 

January 23 – February 15. 2003

 

 

Matthias Groebel - “Vanishing Points - Series”

 

Vanishing Points features digitally produced paintings that incorporate images and text from a variety of sources: TV, video tapes, and Asian video CDs. Groebel manipulates the sampled television images, addressing the general cultural memory inherent in these images. By synthesizing traditional painting with computer printing techniques, Groebel constructs the machines that manufacture the paintings, he combines the elements associated with painting and reconfigures the working process, making it clear that the vanishing point of his artistic practice lays outside the canvas. Groebel’s interest in painting is not about painting, however, instead he uses the vocabulary of painting as a means to depict how perception is altered.

 

Originally the vanishing point was invented in the renaissance as a means to construct a representation of space. This development coincided with the birth of the individual and marked a shift of consciousness. Groebel maintains that the modified representation of space introduced by the camera marks another shift of consciousness. Television pictures are the most removed images from the mathematical renaissance construction and are perceived as "real" today.

 

Matthias Groebel is a German artist living and working in Cologne.

 

 

Bradley Rubenstein

 

In Bradley Rubenstein's works the psychological associations are rich and often sinister, suggesting the perils and pleasures of both sexual development and biotechnology. Series of hybrid anatomies explore similar themes of lost youth, the genealogy of identity, and unfettered biological bodies.

 

Rubenstein's images incorporate photographs of friends and family, early childhood drawings, PET, MRI, and x-ray scans, acupuncture diagrams, and art historical references.  All of these disparate elements are reconfigured through a complex process that combines traditional picture making methods with modern technology.

 

 

Andrew Topolski - “Rotation Drones”

 

In  Andrew Topolski’s recent works the artist exquisitely depicts mysterious structures which incorporate details of linear fields, architectural systems, intricate logarithmic spirals, mathematical diagrams and elements from musical scores.   

 

Excerpts from Clarity of Vision an essay by Charlotta Kotik:

      

"The work of Andrew Topolski revolves around one of  the oldest yet one of the flexible mediums known to man - the medium of drawing. And although it has transformed in this century in truly dramatic ways, in the work of this artist it has reached yet another dimension. Topolski’s complex and beautiful works on paper force us to define the category of drawing even further, enriching it in ways previously uncharted.”

 

 

Dion Kliner  - "The Lost Pleiad, Fragment"

 

“Take a walk through almost any museum and you'll see sculptures of figures that are smooth, and stiff, and uninspired.  Sometimes if you lower your gaze, something more than the body is afoot.  There, below the arms and legs, beneath an ass or under foot, it is possible to discover a base of surprising expression and interest which is usually overlooked.  Not the pedestal mined you, but the base.  It is in this lower region that you find the sculptor working qua sculptor without concern for figurative conventions.  This is where the sculptor of Old can be seen pushing material around with the freedom and unbounded will to make sculpture of a Modern without even knowing what a Modern would be.” 

 

Dion Kliner’s sculptures are sculptures of the bases of some of these sculptures---Not identical reproductions, but close enough approximations that if a person were familiar with the original sculpture and remembered the base they would recognize Kliner’s sculpture as the base.  For most people, however, bases are usually of little interest, so given the look of these sculptures the realization that they are bases is forestalled until the titles reveal them as such.  "The Mountain Man" is Frederick Remington's "Mountain Man"; "The Lost Pleiad" is Randolph Rogers' "Lost Pleiad".  Not to understand the sculptures as bases is not to understand them at all.

 

For further information please contact Marian Ziola @ Universal Concepts Unlimited: 212 727 7575