Elizabeth Peyton, Elias, 2014.
In her work, Elizabeth Peyton achieves a combination of what at first would appear to be mutually exclusive qualities: on the one hand, her paintings seem to indicate an attitude of fascination and admiration for her subjects, which have included artists, musicians, politicians and other well known cultural figures, historical as well as contemporary. On the other hand, Peyton’s pictures also convey a sense of intimacy, of quiet, of a solitary access to those depicted, which would seem to contradict the exposed status of many of her subjects. That Peyton’s work never converts this intimacy into a false sense of privacy has everything to do with the virtuosity with which she deploys her painterly style: From her early, highly reflected application of a bold, yet sensitive, and sometimes even fragile brushwork, to her recent, more hard-edged execution of the painter’s stroke, it is clear throughout that Peyton constructs her work with a keen eye to matters of form.
The subject of her edition for “Texte zur Kunst” is Elias Bender Rønnefelt, lead singer of the Danish punk band Iceage. The closeness of the relation between the painter and the musician here translates into the making of the work: Peyton produced the print from life in the studio. It is again the characteristic intervention of form that shapes a moment of mutual artistic appreciation (Peyton first came across Rønnefelt when she heard his voice on the radio), and this moment of the live sitting in the studio, into a picture at once forceful and delicate.
Medium: Lithograph printed on 300 g/m2 Vélin d´Arches paper
Paper size: 65.5 × 49.7 cm,
Image size: 43.5 x 32.5 cm
Edition: 100 + 20 A.P. + 10 P. P.
Numbered and signed on the front
Price: € 550 SOLD OUT
Ken Okiishi, gesture / data (micro thumbnail scale, boxed), 2014
New York-based artist Ken Okiishi’s recent work tests – and often overwhelms – the technical limits of how we view and circulate art now. Offered here is the latest iteration of his “gesture/data” series, which translates into a portable, personal handheld object of the larger wall-mounted AbEx video “painting” he presented earlier this year in New York at the Whitney Biennial and at Reena Spaulings Fine Art.
For Okiishi, screens are canvases to be (over)loaded with layers of digital and material information. To create this edition, he began by filming the “no signal” blue screen of a common CRT monitor in HD. Given the discrepancy in reception/transmission rates, the videocamera, seeing more than it should, distorted the original Klein-esque monochrome recording a pixelated array of “too much information”. Compressed as an MP4 file (the current standard for video sharing), the video is presented here on a smartphone-size screen housed by an empty box. The surface of each device has been directly handpainted “by the artist” in green chroma key paint—a material used to knock out backgrounds in film postproduction so that new imagery can be grafted in. Okiishi, however, applies this paint chiefly to reassert the void, and without the intention or even possibility of inserting any image in its place.
His painterly gesture thus destroys the digital image and with it, the data’s carrier, the screen. Like a music box, this piece operates only when open, the full spectacle of the stage/art gallery configured specifically for personal viewing.
Medium: Chroma Key video paint on screen embedded in box, HD transferred to MP4
(color, silent)
Size: closed: 16 × 22.3 × 5 cm,
Size open: 36 × 22.3 × 5.5 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 A.P.
Numbered and signed inside
Price: € 350
These limited editions are available at Texte zur Kunst
