New Dawn at Neumeister Bar-Am

Artists: Ry David Bradley, Walter Dexel, Harm van den Dorpel, Kalle Lindmark, Jonas Lund, Jeffrey Alan Scudder, Kate Steciw, Steciw/de Joode, Priscilla Tea

Exhibition title: New Dawn

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico

Venue: Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin, Germany

Date: June 24 – July 29, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin

New Dawn presents the work of 9 artists whose approach to painting can be traced to a shared concern for the pictorial, and its recent fracture into the digital divide. The works span a range of mediums from traditional painting to algorithmically assisted drawing. In the presentation of the show a suspended painting in the centre of the gallery acts as both a barrier and gateway, where history is quite literally embedded in the contemporary. Across all works in the show, from the early 20th Century to the present, a shared concern can be traced to the balance struck at the dawn of abstraction and its relationship to documentary nature of the image itself.

To serve this purpose a widescreen format minimalist landscape painting by Priscilla Tea is suspended in the centre of the space, a verso recto display that includes the work of 20th Century constructivist Walter Dexel. Mounted in the internal framework on the rear side of the landscape, this presentation serves as a motif between the passage of progeny and progenitor, seeking to abandon distinctions of the old and the new. Perhaps suggesting each addition to the canon of painting occurs as a layer upon what was. At face value we are presented with Tea’s bleak and meditative landscape, equal parts virtual and actual, sweeping between a GPS style rendering and a desert scene in nuanced measures. Mounted inside it we find a piece born of the essence of geometric enquiry in the work of Dexel, perhaps to illustrate in no uncertain terms that painting is in fact, like a server rack or a CPU, loaded in to even the most contemporary iterations of itself. The pure scale of Tea’s work also affords the addition of other works hung inside of it and here a third relationship is made. Presented here is the photographically produced, but painterly informed work of Kate Steciw, forming a concise geometric relationship to the Dexel piece. Here artists across 100 years of time respond to similar conditions but with different tools, itself a cyclic metaphor for the passing of one day into another.

-Ry David Bradley