Horror Vacui
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A variety of techniques and bodies of work are combined in the exhibition Horror Vacui, which is based on the artist's book of the same name and is being launched in it. These include a large-scale, meticulous pencil drawing of Rubens's "The Lion Hunt," an Old Masters piece from the 17th century; tiny porcelain figurines, some of which hang like a baroque element torn from its place in a distant castle and brought to the gallery space; some of which are covered in gold and set on hand-carved stones; and large-screen paintings featuring an imagined landscape. The entire exhibition area features interactions between raw and treated materials, between wild or disturbed nature and orderly nature, and between tradition and destruction.
All of the pieces in the exhibition are connected by the parallel axes of beauty and roughness. The large landscape paintings, for example, fit the conventional notion that painting is a "window," providing an open view toward heaven or fantasy, but they always include "disruption," whether it be in the form of fragmentation or artificial connections between elements. The detailed and fragile ceramic sculptures, where poetic frailness and delicacy emerge from the rough and "dry" surfaces, further exhibit this tension between the beautiful and the unsettled.
An installation of chiseled rocks, stones, books, and gold fingers is set up on the room's central table. The material interaction of the various components preserves and reproduces the distinction between the most raw and the most refined and treated: the natural rock, the chiseled rock, the elegant fingers made of English porcelain and gold luster, and finally the book—a fully treated world, bound and sewn into fabric embossed by hand with gold foil writing
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