About Painting II at Rolando Anselmi

Artists: Thomas Arnolds, Rachael Bos, Enrico Della Torre, Katelyn Eichwald, Alina Grasmann, Thomas Lawson, Jennifer J. Lee, Sophie Varin, Yuri Yuan

Exhibition title: About Painting II

Venue: Rolando Anselmi, Rome, Italy

Date: October 22 – December 15, 2022

Photography: Sebastiano Luciano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Rolando Anselmi, Berlin/Rome

Rolando Anselmi is thrilled to announce the opening of About Painting II, a group exhibition that – by echoing last year’s About Painting – aims to present an articulate overview that explores contemporary painting. The relevance of this medium is examined through the work of nine international artists who, diverse in their approaches and techniques, have been invited to exhibit their personal understanding of the medium itself and to expand the conventional debate around the notion of painting.

This second event will present works by Thomas Arnolds (b. 1975, DE), Rachael Bos (b. 1999, USA), Enrico Della Torre (b. 1988, ITA), Katelyn Eichwald (b. 1987, USA), Alina Grasmann (b. 1989, DE), Thomas Lawson (b. 1951, GB), Jennifer J. Lee (b. 1977, USA), Sophie Varin (b. 1993, FR) and Yuri Yuan (b. 1996, CHN).

The exhibition opens with Sophie Varin, whose works combine familiar moments and emotions into dream-like scenarios. The vivid tones of Who Knows and We Don’t Like Your House Either expand the space of a narrow medium, the figures are elongated by intense lighting and the atmosphere seems to paint lived moments that echo in the mind. In J. Dokić, Rachael Bos captures the gestures and movements of the tennis player, cropped in such a way as to render the figure almost anonymous and place for experimentation with abstraction, fixing the action with a firm lens in her photographic cut. Enrico Della Torre investigates the nature of painting, in an attempt to study less explored places, legitimizing a trace or empty space as the only element of the painting. Through symbolism, metaphors and magic realism, Yuri Yuan paints outdoor landscapes that become projections of psychological states. In Ski Lift and Love Letter, pink is an element of insecurity, the brushstrokes give a strong sense of movement, conveying a melancholic feeling of moments that are coming to an end.

Proceeding to the lower floor, the visitor is greeted by Dream of the arrogant prince, which, together with Roman head I, testifies to Thomas Lawson‘s focus on the depiction of the human form through multiple allegorical possibilities: his works intimately explore bodies and their psychological depths in its most treacherous manifestations, so the painting is a way of understanding how subjects relate to their social environments. An everyday gesture such as cutting becomes, in Katelyn Eichwald‘s Cut and Cutting, an opportunity to study movements, fixing gestures and habits in search of the most unexplored details. Her works portray the serenity of digression in habitual movements and the potential for discovery in slow moments. American culture, its architecture, literature and cinema converge in the series Sculpting in Time, where Alina Grasmann combines the external appearance of the places portrayed with the feelings generated by them. Grasmann paints places and actions that live in a dilated instant, yet appear as if frozen in the artist’s imagination and in the visitor’s mind. Without resorting to symbolism, the scenes sculpted in time offer the possibility of being explored, experienced and interpreted in their multiple subjective meanings. Thomas Arnolds reflects on the possibilities of painting: in the series Run, the artist develops a complex and consistent position that negotiates central issues of the medium in a coherent balance of at first glance contradicting designs: abstraction and figuration, minimal and gestural, space and image. Jennifer J. Lee portrays randomly chosen images with an acute spatial and formal research, painting on a thick burlap that degrades the mechanical process of photography. Untitled and Untitled (Desert Spoon) are meticulously constructed in an attempt to disassemble an image, analyse it in its details and then reconstruct it.