Triumph of the painting exhibition

油画的胜利 展览

萨奇画廊

Paula Rego

第一张 Paula Rego
The Family
1988, Acrylic on canvas backed paper
213 x 213 cm


第二张 Paula Rego
The Fitting
1989, Acrylic on canvas backed paper
183 x 132 cm


第三张 Paula Rego
Swallows the Poisoned Apple
1995, Pastel on paper, mounted on aluminium
170 x 150 cm

In Swallows The Poison Apple, Paula Rego revises the tale of Snow White to expose the fallible value of youth. Dressed in traditional Disney garb, this Snow White isn’t a beautiful princess, but a middle-aged woman. Pictured moments after eating the poison apple, she lays sprawled amidst overturned furniture, suggesting painful and violent demise. Clutching her skirts, she alludes to her sexual nature, as if clinging to something slipping away. Her body lies between a blanket adorned with spring blossoms, and a sinister backdrop of red and black. Rego illustrates the conflict of reality encroaching on the socially imposed myths of female worth, construing aging as both a physical and psychological violation.

关于 Paula Rego

Franz Ackermann

第一张 Franz Ackermann
Mental Map: Evasion V
1996, Acylic on Canvas
275 x 305cm

In Mental Map: Evasion V, Franz Ackermann creates a biotic abstraction, a template for natural phenomena dictated by design. His jumbled composition is harmonious in its turmoil: concentric patterns of colour expose hints of identifiable place (a street map, a building interior, a snippet of landscape) only to dislocate them in a maze of organic generalisations.

Constructed graphics are corroded, integrated as if by evolution, to incorporate somatic qualities: sublime contemplation is achieved only through artificial enhancement.

第二张 Franz Ackermann
New Building
1999, Oil on Canvas
260 x 200cm

Franz Ackermann paints New Building as a package holiday resort spiralling out of control. Destination: doesn’t matter. This exact development could be found anywhere. His warped perspective and candy-coloured banners compose an off-kilter composition, both unsettling and jubilant.

A triumph of marketing over nature, his hard-edged abstraction springs like Poseidon’s gift from the sea: the new universal symbol for ‘beach’.

第三张 Franz Ackermann
Zooropa
2001, Oil on Canvas
200 x 250cm

Franz Ackermann is a perpetual tourist: his paintings are like large trippy postcards from the edge. Dealing with globalisation and the commodification of cultural landscape, his work is representative of an ever-shrinking world.
Referring to his images as ‘mental maps’, Franz Ackermann readily digests the subtle nuances of popular destinations and regurgitates them as international signifiers: brightly coloured shapes, high-impact graphics and pop iconography.

Kai Althoff

第三张 Kai Althoff
Untitled
2001, Boat varnish, watercolour, pen and pencil on board
50 x 40cm

Untitled shows a group of black-clad men gathered around a table, immediately suggestive of conspiracy and covert sexual tension. Kai Althoff portrays the intrigue in the paint itself: yellow confronting black, the tenuous texture of the fabric and the oblique fly-on-the-ceiling angle which compresses the subjects into their opposing directions.
His all-male cast of characters gives credence to the corruptibility and heroism of youth. Pictured with an authoritative voyeurism, Kai Althoff infers a complicit approval to their coven.

第二张 Kai Althoff
Untitled
1997, pen, pencil and tape on board
186 x 100cm

Kai Althoff's soldiers are drawn with delicate stylised dandyism. Conveyed with refined nobility, debauchery and humanity become indistinguishable; cruelty is portrayed with an acute tenderness. Flattened to an almost decorative motif, Althoff’s scene reads like theatre. Reminiscent of Georg Grosz's depictions of Berlin’s WW1 underworld, deplorable action is staged for consensual pleasure, a chic poster glamorising the (un)desirable.

第一张 Kai Althoff
Untitled
2000, Lacquer, paper, watercolour and varnish on canvas
50 x 50cm

Kai Althoff’s paintings of Prussian soldiers flirt with a homoerotic subtext. His decorated brotherhood thinly veils their carnal motives under the guise of authority. He paints his violence with a sensual tenderness, rendered in the creaminess of folk tale fantasy.

关于 Kai Althor

Andy Collins

第一张 Andy Collins
Untitled
2005, Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
150 x 137cm
Combining both the spiritualism of abstract painting with the sublime numbness of mass media reproduction, Andy Collins infuses Untitled with a divine aura. Reminiscent of religious painting, Collins’s blues and golds evaporate into halos of blinding white radiance. Space becomes the focus of Collins’s painting. Suggestive of a topographical map, his forms waver with entropic energy, condensing and expanding in their abstracted plane.

第二张 Andy Collins
Untitled
2002, Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
175 x 165cm

Andy Collins’s paintings glow with a transcendental eroticism, bringing about a heightened state of awareness where physical sensuality courts cerebral enlightenment. Inspired by the prurience of fashion adverts, Untitled’s composition construes desire’s lingering remains as a Rorschach-like distortion; a mandala of allurement and absence. Collins conceives overwhelming sensation as an intangible void; his paintings resonate with a voyeuristic proclivity. Equally intimate and distant, his obsessive process (of up to 30 layers of seamless application) infuses his smooth surface with a slick confidence.

第三张 Andy Collins
Untitled
2003, Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
122 x 129.5cm

Andy Collins’s paintings manufacture a hermetically sealed aesthetic, offering a deceptive brand of pop. In Untitled, benign-toned colour fields sit with antiseptic perfection, their plastic forms fade in and out of soft-porn focus, pulsating from the contoured motif. In hand-rendering the trappings of superficial attraction, Collins serves up clinical beauty with a fine strategic awareness. Fluctuating between the mechanical and biological, Collins evokes an unsettling hybrid: a calculating and corporate detachment born of the most intimate sentiment.

第四张 Andy Collins
Untitled
2001, Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
127 x 134.5cm

Andy Collins’s paintings are lusciously synthetic. Cold and glossy, his large pastel canvases are suffocating vacuums of glamour. Working from fashion photos, Collins’s abstracted forms are derived from the overlooked in-between spaces of supermodel spreads. Folds in fabric, creases in elbows, knees and armpits become a pattern of fetishised contemplation. Their contours are retraced and suggested forms are embellished, creating ethereal motifs that are both organic and electrifying. Collins’s process is one of almost perverse fixation. Taking several months to complete a painting, he painstakingly constructs his airless forms entirely by hand, leaving no trace of brushwork. In Untitled, his biomorphic composition, a sublime vacuous beauty, mesmerises both seduction and emptiness.

第五张 Andy Collins
Untitled
2001, Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
141 x 145cm

Andy Collins's paintings are models of visual perfection. Approaching painting with a minimalist's fetishism, Collins hones his canvases to the simplest and boldest statements to capitalise on the power of suggested form. Working from photos, Andy Collins removes the subject, focussing instead on the evocative possibility of implied image. His abstracted patterns retain the essence of their original picture, and extrapolate a more complex interpretation, provoking emotional and spiritual reactions to qualities of surface, colour and composition. In Untitled, Andy Collins presents a pattern of mesmerising consonance. His biomorphic form insinuates bodily tactility; through clinical rendering, Andy Collins elevates these connotations to a metaphysical plane, creating a sensuality that's idealistic and conceptually pure.

Dexter Dalwood

第一张 Dexter Dalwood
Bay of Pigs
2004, Oil on canvas
268 x 348cm
In Bay of Pigs, Dexter Dalwood recreates the failed 1961 U.S. attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, a haunting tropical image somewhere between vacation brochure and Apocalypse Now. Along the bottom of the canvas, an upside-down version of Picasso's Dejeuner sur l'herbe stands in for the foreign shore: while the world is in crisis, Picasso is painting palm trees in Cannes. 19.04.61 is engraved on a nearby rock, stolen from a Picasso painting finished that very day.

第二张 Dexter Dalwood
Gorbachev's Winter Retreat
2000, Oil on Canvas
198 x 236cm
Gorbachev's Winter Retreat is a modest structure, straddled between the split landscape of old and new Russia. Quoting Edvard Munch (for that Eastern European feel), Dexter Dalwood offers the ousted premier a grim prospect of a lonely, uneventful future as just another forgotten historical figure with nothing but memories, banished to a life of rural idyll and inconsequence.

第三张 Dexter Dalwood
Jackie Onassis
2000, Oil on canvas
214 x 244cm
In his painting of Jackie Onassis' infamous Mediterranean yacht retreat, Dexter Dalwood has captured the time in a single glance: the over-designed black lacquer tables, the hideous Florida chintz sofa, neo-deco lamps and waterbed. On the wall, Andy Warhol's diamond dust painting Shoes (Magnin) stamps it all with an exact date: 1980. The painting encompasses all that is perfectly fashionable just like Jackie O herself. It's only the resounding hollowness of this scene that gives way to thoughts of a tragic heroine: surrounded by all the luxuries money can buy, her only real solace comes from a simple sunset, which she can watch for hours and dream away her grief.

第四张 Dexter Dalwood
Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse
2000, Oil on Canvas
214 x 258cm
It's hard to identify this urban-perfect scene as the suicide site of a grunge god; only the idle guitar and empty chair suggest that somebody is absent. Dexter Dalwood imagines his scenes with the up-close-impersonal sterility of Hello! magazine spotlights; everything needed to know about the person is in the paint. Like Magritte's Empire of Light, Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse is both day and night; a lot of time has been spent contemplating in this room. Bright-lights big-city success blares in the distance, the boughs in bloom offer unattainable promise on the other side of the glass. While inside there's only a corroded pipe and pathetic box of posies to signify trampled self-esteem. Dexter Dalwood's painting is an allegory of the fallacy of heroism.

第五张 Dexter Dalwood
Sunny Von Bulow
2003, Oil on Canvas
105 x 207cm
In his painting of Sunny von Bulow, Dexter Dalwood draws poignant comparison between the New York socialite and Pre-Raphaelite representations of Shakespeare's Ophelia. Plagued by depression and mental instability, Sunny slipped into an irreversible coma in 1980; her husband, art dealer Claus von Bulow, was initially convicted and later acquitted of attempted poisoning. Here, Dexter Dalwood portrays the heiress as an eternal beauty, trapped in a morbidly poetic slumber. Based on an 1852 painting by John Everett Millais, Dexter Dalwood weaves art-historical reference into contemporary popular conscience, adding gravitas and reverence of legacy to the transient limelight of today's media culture.

Inka Essenhigh


第一张 Inka Essenhigh
Subway
2005
200 x 180cm
Inka Essenhigh paints Subway as a commuters’ opera. Her smooth surface and seamless paint replicates the sublime precision of urban life. Essenhigh’s corporate toned environment becomes a stage on which her strange and distorted figures conjoin in symphonic movement, leaving plastic trails in their haste as they swoon through the scene. Turning everyday banality into surreal case study, Essenhigh gives humorous portrayal of people at their rush hour worst. Drawing stylistic reference from both graphic novels and golden age animation, caricatured city-types gain comically heroic status, rendering a humble slice of America as grand theatrical drama.

第二张 Inka Essenhigh
Blue Wave
2002, oil on canvas
178 x 188cm
"I think about [my paintings] as being about America: fake, fun, pop, violent but also quite attractive," Inka Essenhigh explains. In Essenhigh's most recent work, images from suburbia convolute into grotesque dreamscapes; her pastoral scenes of normality belie their true nature as instances of alien horror. In Shopping, Inka Essenhigh readily captures the greed of a chav-land mall with cartoonist's exaggeration: shell-suited blonds undulate with flirtatious curvature, arms cum tentacles slither for bargain goods. In distorting the scene, Inka Essenhigh draws humorous caricature as well as a heightened sense of plasticity; the women resemble figurines in a themed setting, mannequins illustrating their own insincerity.

第三张 Inka Essenhigh
Shopping
2005, oil on linen
178 x 193cm
"I think about [my paintings] as being about America: fake, fun, pop, violent but also quite attractive," Inka Essenhigh explains. In Essenhigh's most recent work, images from suburbia convolute into grotesque dreamscapes; her pastoral scenes of normality belie their true nature as instances of alien horror. In Shopping, Inka Essenhigh readily captures the greed of a chav-land mall with cartoonist's exaggeration: shell-suited blonds undulate with flirtatious curvature, arms cum tentacles slither for bargain goods. In distorting the scene, Inka Essenhigh draws humorous caricature as well as a heightened sense of plasticity; the women resemble figurines in a themed setting, mannequins illustrating their own insincerity.

第四张 Inka Essenhigh
Supergod
2001, oil and enamel on canvas
183 x 188cm
Inka Essenhigh translates the subtle qualities of drawing into luxurious paintings. Resonating with exquisite draughtsmanship, Supergod is reminiscent of the design purity of the art deco era. Painting in oil and enamel, Inka Essenhigh uses the cool gloss effect of her media to create a sense of hyper-artificiality: her flat surface possesses a richness of synthetic colour, deceptive in illusion of depth and luminosity. Influenced by 19th century caricatures, oriental art and contemporary comics, Inka Essenhigh's paintings are both exotic and operatic: envisioning futuristic mythologies frozen in sublime moments of suspended animation.

第五张 Inka Essenhigh
The Adoration
1999, oil and enamel on canvas
183 x 193cm
Inka Essenhigh's work flits between abstraction and representation; her suggestive forms morph composure of design with quiescent sexual intrigue. In The Adoration, Inka Essenhigh's painting exudes an energy from within: the liquid properties of the enamel convey an inherent sensuality. Muted tones and organic shapes are applied in thin, skin-like layers to create the effect of an animation cell, seductive in its self-contained intricacy and precious quality. Inka Essenhigh uses flat planes and delicate lines to convey a commodified ideal of the exotic: static representation of motion becomes a device of zealous fixation.

第六张 Inka Essenhigh
WWF
2002, oil on canvas
183 x 203cm
Inka Essenhigh's paintings redefine pop as the epitome of aesthetic hierarchy. Her ultra-slick surfaces operate as virtual fields, where estranged narratives play out in cross-wired systems of reference and recognition. In WWF, Inka Essenhigh draws from romanticised emblems of decadence: the classicism of Greek frescos or the empyreal motifs of Asian lacquer-ware are resembled with futuristic technophilia, made more dynamic in the fantasy realm of cartoon. The god-like figures contort in a stylised motif of aestheticised violence and sexuality. Inka Essenhigh's highly structured formalism eschews emotional intimacy; line, space and colour are used to create stunning tension, a baroque beauty that is majestically antiseptic.

Wilhelm Sasnal


第一张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Airplanes
2001, Oil on Canvas
150 x 300cm
Wilhelm Sasnal approaches painting as a formal exercise. He often borrows subjects from art history, 20th century propaganda, and photojournalism. Airplanes is a dark appropriation of Alighiero Boetti's famous airplane drawings. Subverting the original pastoral optimism, Wilhelm Sasnal's planes are engulfed in smoke as if they've been hit by enemy fire.

Wilhelm Sasnal deconstructs the hierarchy of 'high culture' by filtering it through mass-media association. Through painting, Sasnal explores his own interpretation and understanding of imagery. His work constantly questions the space between ‘personal' and ‘public', and strives to define individual experience within a world order of collective consciousness.

第二张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Anka)
2001, Oil on Canvas
45 x 50cm

第三张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Man at the Control Panel
2000, Oil on Canvas
180 x 160cm
Man at the Control Panel has the design of a government-issue poster. Through the act of painting, Wilhelm Sasnal divests this once authoritative image of any sense of infused power. It becomes merely an advertisement for banality, an explicit logo of its own defunct politics.

Through the personal intervention of making, Wilhelm Sasnal promotes a democratisation of image ownership. Through painting all things are rendered equal.

第四张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Dominika)
2001, Oil on Canvas
33 x 33cm

第五张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Factory
2000, Oil on Canvas
101 x 101cm
Painted from a famous propaganda image, Wilhelm Sasnal's Factory swaps the celebratory ideal of the Socialist Worker for the impersonal hardness of mechanised production. Sasnal treats painting as a reductive process: information is lost in translation from photography to painting.

Using the original photo's black-and-white tones, details are eradicated through heightened contrast, the image simplified through ‘overexposure' and the intervention of the artist's hand. Wilhelm Sasnal's replicated images are dissociated from their once powerful meanings: they exist only as mere vestiges of themselves.

第六张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady
2002, Oil on Canvas
30 x 30cm
For Wilhelm Sasnal, painting is imperative as a means to challenge traditional expectations of representation and perception. Through the personal intervention of making, his subject matter becomes distorted. Images are pared down to their barest essentials and estranged from their original context and meaning.

Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady resurrects the photographer's iconic image. Gone is her golden Soviet virtue, replaced by a fiercely dark shadow. Wilhelm Sasnal's reconstruction is a hollow memento, a death mask of a graven image.

第七张 Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Peaches)
2001, Oil on Canvas
33 x 33cm

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