Artist: Daniel Karrer
Exhibition title: Hands Dripping Red with Sunset
Venue: Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland
Date: May 6 – June 17, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer’s third solo exhibition at Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, can be understood as a continuation of his exhibition at the Kunsthalle Winterthur last winter, Hands Dripping Red with Sunrise. The installation placed within the exhibition space generates an additional pictorial level and thus illuminates Karrer’s multi-layered practice.
Karrer’s working process is generated through interplay between analogue painting and digital image composition. It is, however, important that the subjects of his painting can develop their own dynamic. Using different methods of applying paint and different painting rhythms Karrer manages to present specific qualities of his subjects that would never be possible in a purely digital image.
Karrer’s pictures and his working process are all about contradictions and opposites – digital–analogue, 2D–3D, sharp–blurry, vagueness–precision, representational and non-representational. As Aoife Rosenmeyer observed, ›[Karrer] is confronted with the paradox of a medium that, visually speaking, offers infinite dimensions or unrelenting flatness.‹[1]
Since his studio residency in Berlin last year, Karrer has been working with reverse glass painting and painting onto glass. He had long been playing with the idea of painting on glass because this ground displays similar visual characteristics to a computer’s screen. A reverse glass painting is traditionally built up in reverse order, with the foreground applied first and the background last. Karrer, however, found his own manner of dealing with the medium. He removes colour with his palette knife and thus opens up particular areas, as if he were using the eraser tool in Photoshop. Through this ›cutting out‹ of colour, sharp edges are created and this again makes the image approximate a digital aesthetic. A new abstraction is emerging from this technique which was not previously found in Karrer’s painting on canvas and wood. It seems as if the artist’s subject is indeed that of working with an analogue form of Photoshop. In the process his virtual subject develops its own physical reality on the surface of the glass, yet the works also refer to looking at screens and the surroundings with which we are confronted on a daily basis. Karrer draws out the full potential of the medium of glass by playing with multi-layered image constructions. The illusions of depth and three-dimensionality inherent in the subject and those which Karrer creates through perspectival constructions are yet further intensified through the glass and its reflections.
Daniel Karrer, born in 1983 in Binningen, Basel-Landschaft CH, lives and works in Basel CH. Following a BA in Art and Education at the HGK, Basel CH and a study exchange at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig D, he completed his MA at the HGK Basel CH. In 2015 he was awarded a Cahier d’Artist by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, in 2016 a residency at the Atelier Mondial in Berlin D, by the Christoph Merian Stiftung. In 2017 he is a nominee for the Strabag Art Award.
Selected exhibitions to date: 2016/7 Kunsthalle Winterthur CH; Kunstmuseum Olten CH; Cultuurcentrum Hasselt B; 2015 Art Rotterdam NL; 2014: Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich CH; Kunsthalle Basel CH; 2013 Kunstraum Riehen CH; sic! Raum für Kunst, Lucerne; 2012 Schwarzwaldallee, Basel CH; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau CH; Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich CH.
[1] Aoife Rosenmeyer, On Screens, in: Daniel Karrer, Collection Cahier d’Artist 2015, Luzern 2015, p. 46.
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2017, installation view, Herrmann Germann Contemporary, Zurich
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 173 x 114 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 80 x 60 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 53 x 42 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 92 x 72 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 163 x 133.5 cm
Daniel Karrer, Hands Dripping Red with Sunset, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, 40 x 50 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 42 x 32 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 21 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 26 x 32 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 32 x 26 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 32 x 26 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 26 x 32 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 24 x 30 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 26 x 32 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 87 x 72.5 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 87 x 72.5 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 67 x 51 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 67 x 51 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 32 x 26 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 62 x 51 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 32 x 26 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2017, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, framed, 24 x 18 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, 30 x 24 cm
Daniel Karrer, Untitled, 2016, oil, reverse glass painting, 24 x 30 cm