Poker

Opening: Thur Jan 18, 2007, 6.30 pm

From January 18th Monica De Cardenas will present a group show of five young painters: Whitney Bedford, Brian Fahlstrom, Kirsten Everberg, Kirstine Roepstorff and Elizabeth Neel; five young artists of the contemporary scene, to introduce a new tendency permanently at the edge between abstraction and representation. The curator of the show, Nikola Cernetic, has chosen these five artists among the most interesting young painters, already sought after by eminent collectors and avant-garde museums.

Brian Fahlstrom (*1978, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in Los Angeles) at the moment is part of an important group show at the Orange County Museum in California and in the USA TODAY exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Brian Fahlstrom’s landscapes encapsulate an immediacy of creative production, using the act of painting as a form of intuitive expression. Flaunting his study of the masters, Fahlstrom appropriates the essence of artists such as Van Gogh, Derain and Cézanne with an air of unnerving casualness. Composing landscape by means of affiliation, Fahlstrom decodes both nature and its representation into an unruly system of attributions and translations. Clouds, trees and mountains are distorted, not to suggest themselves, but to insinuate their art-historical lineage. Through deciphering the liturgy of painting, Fahlstrom resurrects artistic romanticism as a refreshingly new enchantment.

Kirsten Everberg (Los Angeles), comes from the successful last year solo exhibition at the Consortium of Dijon. She represents above all interiors and architectural details. Her interest is in the language and structure of composing formal and narrative elements in a box-like space. Everberg is the most figurative artist in the group, but she has a particular technique in her pictorial expression given from dripping enamel paint on the canvas on wood, without using strokes.

The works by Kirstine Roepstorff (*1972 Denmark) are in general collages full of tales and tensions; fragments of color shaped on figures and places that generate our life. A baroque and ironic style pervades almost all her works, sparing no expressive energy. Often these works become a social parody, at the same time exalting its dynamic energy. Crowded postcards of tales escaping the present, but often punctually determining it.

Also only shortly on the international scene, Elizabeth Neel (*1976 Vermont, lives in New York) has already collected wide consents and the inclusion in important collections. A vital fusion of abstraction and representation is shrewdly inter-weft in her paintings. Her canvas are characterized by luxuriant strokes of vivid color arranged with dark zones, nevertheless an unexpected apparition of images enters and exits from depth. Neel unearths disparate visual material from the Internet. The artist plays with our cognitive recognition to the extent that there is little contrast between the often ambiguously fragmented forms and the juicy vital colors that melt into each other as easily as they shoot out.

With few strokes and very intense colors Whitney Bedford (*1976 Baltimore, Maryland, lives in Los Angeles), reintroduces classical and dramatic subjects like sailing ships on tumultuous seas and icebergs. On Bedford’s paintings historic discourses surrounding the medium collide as pictorial representation and abstraction battle for dominance with neither gaining the upper hand.

An exhibition in which all artists show in Italy for the first time, a “Poker” given by four queens and an ace.

Poker
Whitney Bedford, Kirsten Everberg, Brian Fahlstrom, Elizabeth Neel, Kirstine Roepstorff