Simone Lanzenstiel’s work featured at Barbara Gross Galerie

Saturday, 15 November 2008 17:09

 

Munich, Germany - Our third exhibition of Simone Lanzenstiel’s work features her newest canvases, which reflect the discoveries and further development of her most recent large public and private works. Inspired by the peculiarities of different sites and their signs of usage, she has employed leftover wallpaper, flawed pieces of wall, crumbling plaster, or cable as artistic material, integrating them into her paintings and thus turning topographical features into a component of painting.  Exhibition November 21, 2008 - January 24, 2009 at Barbara Gross Galerie.

The artist begins with imaginary and immediate elements, such as pavement, construction scaffolding, graffiti, or blotches of paint on the floor of her studio. This recourse to found markings is a breakaway move from the conventional means of painting.

Simone Lanzenstiel develops her painting as a series of actions on the canvas. She shakes, splashes, sprays, brushes, scrawls, and wipes - in an apparently accidental, fleeting manner. This creates free, open zones, light and soaring. In contrast, colors are varied and re-worked until they are finally condensed into painterly figures and powerful accents of color; this finely attuned balance lends rhythm to the work.

The artist prefers to work with acrylics and enamel sprays in predominantly cool, brilliant tones, such as blue, green, purple, and magenta. Each painting is specified by a precise color composition, dominated by white. White is used as ground and mask - it is a color and a non-color, passive and active. White simultaneously limits and intensifies the space in which all of the other colors are expressed. Strong and gentle color gradients cover the entire surface of the picture, only coming to an abrupt stop at the edges of the painting. Hence, the paintings seem to have been removed from a larger context, and yet they expand far into the space.

Simone Lanzenstiel, born in 1970 in Ulm, lives and works in Munich. She studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. In 2003 and 2004 she received a DAAD stipend for a sojourn in New York, and a grant from the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst for the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. In 2006, the GOLART Stiftung awarded her a project grant for an installation. In 2007 she won the first prize in a competition for a site-specific work for the new Biozentrum at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she realized a wall for the building’s four-story atrium. Exhibitions in 2007: Abriss Müllerstrasse 22, Munich (including catalogue); Neuerwerbungen des 21. Jahrhunderts, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Barbara Gross Galerie - Thierschstr. 51 - 80538 München,Germany - Tel +49 89 296272 - Fax +49 89 295510
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