Patricia Low Contemporary is delighted to present a group of five emerging young German artists in a show named Finding Neverland. It features Markus Amm, Hansjörg Dobliar, Oliver Voss, Nicole Wermers and Claudia Wieser, most of them are showing in Switzerland for the first time. Finding Neverland is organized by German guest curator, Juliane von Herz, who lives in Frankfurt. The exhibition includes large-format paintings, installations, drawings, collages and sculpture – many of which are new productions for the show.
The title Finding Neverland is borrowed from the famous dreamland story of Peter Pan, but is not to be mistaken as a theme for a neo-romantic show. On the contrary, Neverland in the context of this group show stands for the search of the unlimited space behind or around the object, for the constant exploration of Geometric Abstraction and excursions (or Peter Pan-like flight back) into Constructivism, Op Art and Minimalism. Each of the participating artists has a different approach to how to depict an abstract three-dimensional space. Although the works of for example Hansjörg Dobliar and Nicole Wermers reveal a similar fascination for conceptual gestures that bring back to our minds the brittleness of constructivist vocabulary, they introduce slightly mystical-looking shapes and fields that generate a pleasant imagery with hypnotic impact on the viewer. In nearly all of the exhibited works – in the objects, surfaces or imagery- it is possible to see some kind of references to art as well as to design, pop- and consumer-culture, architecture and advertising.
Even though forms and shapes are being selected in a playful way from a common repertoire of modernism, they are re-contextualized. References to the History of Art remain but, out of this heritage, a generation of artists presents itself as neither completely abstract nor figurative. Instead, the occupation with space serves to bring back modernist forms into design and everyday culture and back into art.
Markus Amm (b. 1969) lives and works in London. Amm works in a variety of media including painting, collages, sculpture and photographic works. The works on display in the exhibition Finding Neverland form a wall installation consisting of three large painted, collaged and drawn geometric abstract pictures in combination with black and white luminograms that trace a clear lineage to the early 20th Century Modernism. Moholy-Nagy has been the inventor of the lumino- or photograms, the direct exposure of a photosensitive film to light without camera. Amm has been obviously inspired by this technique as well as by the meticulous composed abstractions by Moholy-Nagy and his Bauhaus-colleagues that he now fills with a fresh timeliness. His approach may be conceptual, but it is not strategic in the sense of a masterful intellectual exercise. In his work, the core composition is the result of elementary shapes such as circles, triangles and rectangles, intertwined with parallel and crossing lines, which in turn fragment and splinter these very shapes. Interesting though how he plays off abstraction and figuration against each other, as most of the abstract shapes seem so familiar to the viewer’s eye that they tend to become figurative.
Hansjörg Dobliar (b. 1970) lives and works in Munich and Berlin. His paintings to which he explicitly refers to as landscapes are based on a primordial romantic repertoire, but are interrupted by abstract figures. Typical elements in his paintings are prisms that recall energetic crystals as well as geometric triangular shapes and which open up the canvases to a three-dimensional space.
