 Torben Giehler: Joyride, 2004 acrylic on canvas, 32 x 26 cm Torben Giehler Suspended Animation Hiroshi Sugito Selected Paintings We are pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of the German painter Torben Giehler in our Galerie 1 at Arndt & Partner in Zurich that will show medium-format and large-format paintings. The first impact of Torben Giehler's pictures is a sensation of immediate overwhelming caused by a geometric, abstract maze of lines and colour segments until, in a second step, the eye of the beholder can fight its way through to recognizable spatial worlds so that it may integrate the individual abstract elements into a technoid and urban spatiality. Though Giehler's works clearly refer to landscape painting and, recently, also to genres such as portrait and still life, the colours in the pictures refuse to fulfil the necessities of what the figurative setting would demand. Instead, the colours rather follow an abstract logic defined in the picture itself and therefore put an end to the three-dimensional illusion of depth again and again, each time calling back the beholder to the sheer plain surface of the canvas. Torben Giehler decided to borrow the title of the exhibition from the US heavy metal band "Fantomas" who in their first album "Suspended Animation" present a strictly calculated chaos of bizarre vocal fragments, sound effects taken from Cartoons, and metal guitar. This mixture of sound, arranged in short tracks assigned to specific days of the year, is subdivided into comprehensible acoustic unities that add up to an overall metropolitan scenery. Giehler's picture of the same title "Suspended Animation" is characteristic of the painter's works in that it embodies the idea of synthetic sampling and sound collage and always remains coherent in formal and conceptual terms as it creates a compacted illusionist space. Torben Giehler (*1973) lives and works in New York City. He had solo exhibitions, among others, at Leo Koenig Inc., New York, at Paolo Curti, Milan, and at the Centro de Arte de Salamanca in Spain. Recent participations in group exhibitions included the Prague Biennial (2005), "A Greater New York", PS1, New York (2005), "Surface Tension" at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2004), and "Treasure Island" at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg (2004).  Hiroshi Sugito: Mouth, 2001 acrylic on canvas, 17,91 x 19,88 in In anticipation of the large-scale solo presentation of Hiroshi Sugitos at Arndt & Partner Zurich scheduled for next spring, we show a selection of various individual works from the last ten years in the Galerie 2 at Arndt & Partner Zurich. Hiroshi Sugito's are among those who play with the tightrope walk between figuration and abstraction. Miniaturized objects, many of which are shown as outlined shadows only, hover in front of extensive sketches of picturesque spaces and encourage the viewer to interpret them as poetic traces of memories, phantastic tales, or dreams. Among the recurring motifs in his pictures there are curtains at the left and right hand side that transform the space of the painting into a theatre stage. This is what happens in the biggest and most important work in the exhibition "The Show", 1996: here, countless tiny flying objects appear on the stage but they refuse to be deciphered in narrative terms. Hiroshi Sugito (*1970) lives and works in Nagoya, Japan. Apart from the big solo exhibition "Over the Rainbow" (together with Yoshitomo Nara) at the Pinakothek in Munich and the K21 in Duesseldorf, recent presentations of his works include, for example, the solo exhibitions at Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, at Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, at Fortes Vilaca, Sao Paulo, and at Nicole Klagsbrun, New York. Sugito took part in group exhibitions, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, at the Tokyo Opera City Museum, and at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. Exhibition 18 October - 1 December 2005 Gallery hours Tues-Fri 2 - 6.30 pm, Sat 11 am - 4 pm Galerie Arndt & Partner Lessingstrasse 5 8002 Zürich Telephone +41 (0) 43 817 67 80/81 Fax +41 (0) 43 817 67 82 Email zurich@arndt-partner.de www.arndt-partner.de |
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