Volker Hüller
March 17 – April 24, 2016 | Location: 195 Chrystie St NY NY 10002
11R is delighted to present an exhibition of large-scale paintings, hand-colored etchings and mixed media sculptures by German artist Volker Hüller. The exhibition will be on view from March 17 – April 24, 2016 at both of the gallery’s two spaces at 195 Chrystie Street. This is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition, and his fourth in New York with the gallery.
The exhibition presents new works created by the artist since moving from Berlin to New York in the fall of 2014. An installation in 11R’s East storefront gallery features a suite of large etchings staged against colored walls; these recent works show the development of this important aspect of the artist’s practice. The title of this new group – L.I.T.S. – declares them as a continuation of the The Lost In The Stars series (exhibited in 2013) and also refers to the chat acronym for life is too short. A new sense of rhythm and open-endedness emerges in the etchings presented here. Overall fields of miniature patterns, together with blocks of small and striated lines and hatches, fill in contours of jangled shapes and limb-like forms. In these new images, figures and specters actively enter and exit the picture plane from all sides, creating deliberate overlays and an agitated sense of movement.
Hüller’s new paintings are his most chromatically saturated canvases to date, ranging in palette from cadmium orange and marigold yellow to shades of green; incised lines and scraps of dust and debris, including sand and staples, add glint and texture to the surface. Pictorially, the works feature ambiguously staged interior scenes, some occupied by figures and others with still lifes. Their indeterminate meanings and function traverses towards a singular new canvas featured in the exhibition, a pure abstraction: a collaged stripe painting, comprised of a stack of bold rectangular planes of canvas, framed by stained silk. In the progression from the reductive, simple patterns in the etchings to the geometric color blocking in this most recent work, one may consider Hüller’s deliberate intention to counter our natural intuition to see and understand images.
Volker Hüller was born in 1976 in Forchheim, Germany and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied under the late Norbert Schwontkowski at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Hüller’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Israel Museum. His exhibitions include solo shows at Timothy Taylor, London (2010, 2013); Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2009, 2012); Eleven Rivington, NY (2009, 2011, 2013); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2009, 2012, 2014); and group shows at Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg.