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Dirk Skreber Solo Exhibition: "so so so motekkoi"
2012.10.13. - 11.11.
Opening hours : Tues - Sun 11:00 〜 19:00 (Closed at 18:00 on Sun
Opening Reception: 10.13. / Sat 18:00 - 20:00
Place: NANZUKA (Shibuya Ibis Bldg. B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya Shibuya-ku Tokyo 150-0002, Japan)
NANZUKA is pleased to present Dirk Skreber's first solo exhibition in Asia. Dirk Skreber was born in Lübeck, the famous north German city along the Baltic Sea, and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His works, included in The Saatchi Collection and stored at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt as well as the Cologne Sculpture Park among others, boast a high profile on a global scale. Skreber received the National Gallery Prize for Young Artists (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin) in 2000, and has been established as one of contemporary Germany's leading artists.
Skreber often paints the sites of natural disasters and traffic accidents. The reasoning behind this is his fascination with the process through which familiar scenery or forms become transformed and take on a separate existence. Referring to sculptures he created by crashing real cars, Skreber says, "My concern was not at all about accidents but rather to use a massive and completely real transfer of energy as an opening door to a perspective on the flow of physical laws and metaphysical energies, loading and unloading, transforming and retransforming like batteries or spiritual bodies." That perspective is perhaps also connected to the artistic interest in the process of abstracting a concrete object through destruction, and the theme of how our visual recognition can influence changes in emotion.
Even that tangible fascination of Skreber's, however, compared to the overwhelming energy unleashed by his paintings, almost seems to be a silly question. Just as Skreber alludes to the scenery of his hometown and speaks of the influence from the gigantic iron and steel industrial complex brimming with energy, so, too, his essential quality as a scientist or even inventor, working to develop the very techniques of his paintings as he continues to experiment through trial and error, is not unrelated to the environment in which the artist was raised. The "pluck" paintings that Skreber exhibits are in fact a new type of painting that he invented, in which he illuminates forms through an optical gradation created by plucking away at foam. Skreber has also developed a method of painting in which he creates forms by layering thickly applied paint in concentric rings broken by gaps; these defiant approaches of his seems to present a coherent response to the essential question posed by art concerning what kind of potential an artist can display in today's society.
Works to be displayed in this exhibition include a video piece taken on-site of the creation of his Car Crash Sculptures with a high-speed camera (depicting the very moment the car crashes), miniature models of the Car Crash Sculptures, one new "pluck" painting portrait of a woman, and a new oil painting of a diver swimming under water.
The artist will be visiting Japan for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition. There will be an opening reception with the artist present on October 13th starting at 18:00.
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