Massinissa Selmani - The pace of the outsides / Albrecht Schnider – Painting

Massinissa Selmani - The pace of the outsides

Massinissa Selmani’s drawings attracted special attention during Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures’, at the last Biennial in Venice (2015). With this exhibition, AKINCI is proud to present Selmani’s drawings and animations for the first time in The Netherlands.

The works of Massinissa Selmani are characterized by an extreme simplicity. They are often montages of images and drawings, or short animations in which he mingles humour, irony, and sometimes a sense of revolt.
Selmani reveals the ambiguity of signs and pushes their juxtapositions until absurdity: a picture presents two incompatible scenes that must be connected by looking at them, or a picture duplicated by a tracing paper. This duplication blurs or corrects the image.

Selmani’s subjects often find their origin in current political and social events and newspaper cuttings. The images that they show are the result of a selection process, treatment and cropping inspired by the archive and documentary codes. Sometimes they create a mise en scène or a narrative that opens up various experimentation fields. Besides the drawings, this exhibition offers a number of animations, in which the artist shows the same passion for the simple image and experiment through moving image.

Massinissa Selmani received a special mention from the jury at the 56th Venice Biennale. In 2016, he was winner of the Art Collector Prize in Paris and the Sam Art Projects Prize in Paris. The work of Massinissa Selmani has been recently exhibited at the Dakar Biennial (2014), the CCC of Tours (2015), the first triennial of Vendôme, France (2015), the Lyon Biennial (La vie moderne, curated by Ralph Rugoff, 2015), Art Basel Statements (Selma Feriani Gallery, 2016) and La Maison Salvan, France (2016), Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Poland (2016), the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Frac Centre, France (2017)

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Albrecht Schnider – Painting

Albrecht Schnider (1958, Luzern) is one of the most idiosyncratic painters at work. This is due not so much to his subjects, which comprise the traditional genres of art history such as landscape, figurative painting and still life as well as abstract works. It is more on account of the individual and highly distinctive attitude and direction he follows in terms of both form and content.

Both Schnider’s precise abstract paintings and sculptural objects take as their source the delicate explorations of shifting planes and geometric forms found in the artist’s drawings. Their oppositions of line and surface, presence and absence, are distilled and translated into the larger, more rigid compositions of Schnider’s paintings. Certain hard‐edged forms are filled with matte pigment or reflective metallic, while others are left blank. The continuity and overlap of these planes of colour and negative space play with our sense of perception, leading us to question whether we are seeing shattered parts of a fragmented whole or the layers and voids of a three‐dimensional pictorial window. When we look at Albrecht Schnider’s figurative and abstract drawings and paintings, they are reminiscent of things that are behind us; they point to the void and prefigure something new.

With this exhibition of new work created especially for AKINCI‐ Schnider shows the latest development in his painting. In a step towards an industrialised image production and to avoid irregularities in the paint layer through visible brushstrokes, the artist has decided to use sprayed acrylic lacquer instead of paint. As a result, AKINCI is able to show four brandnew works in striking colours of his newest sprayed‐lacquer paintings, next to two small paintings in which he uses the contrast of the smooth and shiny surfaces of lacquer paint with a bare, rough linen backdrop.

Albrecht Schnider (born 1958, in Lucerne, Switzerland) studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung and the University of Berne. He has received numerous grants and awards for his artistic practice, including Eidgenossisches Kunststipendium in 1989, 1990, and 1992; Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 1990, and the award Manor-Kunstpreis of Lucerne in 1994. In 1998 Kunsthalle Berne presented Schnider’s first solo exhibition and since then the artist has exhibited extensively in museums and institutions including Lucerne, Zurich, Solothurn, and Aarau. In 2011, his works were exhibited in an exhibition under the title ‘Am Ereignishorizont‘ at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. Most recently his works were shown at Marc Jancou in New York and at a comprehensive solo exhibition at Helmhaus, Zurich. Since 1998, Albrecht Schnider lives and works in Berlin. AKINCI presents drawings and animations by Algerian/French artist Massinissa Selmani (1980) and new work by the Berlin-based Swiss artist Albrecht Schnider (1958).