Artist: Maximilian Schubert
Venue: And Now, Dallas, US
Date: October 21 – November 12, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and And Now, Dallas
ANDNOW is pleased to announce Stations, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Maximilian Schubert
In his new series of sculptures, Maximilian Schubert has arranged propane tanks of various sizes in the gallery, treating them as fuel source and pedestal for the crudely bent lengths of metal tubing attached by way of various valves and fittings. The tubing — commonly used as a armature for conventional clay sculpture — is in this case left exposed, serving instead as a support for the small flames that flicker along its lengths. These works, titled Stations, divorce the banal backyard mechanics from their mundane utility, transforming them into makeshift candelabras of tiny points of light in space, a vigil to the works’ own expended energy.
Surrounding the sculptures are Schubert’s ongoing series of Untitled paintings, works that utilize a millennia-old process akin to lost wax casting as a means to fundamentally alter the nature of the painterly object. Unlike in a conventional painting, Schubert’s brushwork is incisive rather than additive; the gouges and distortions of the picture plane result in tense overlays of high and low relief that blur distinctions between surface, support and gesture. Cast in archival polyurethane and fiberglass and finished with trompe l’oeil brushwork, these paintings are a kind of fugitive from sculpture that reimagine the painting-as-object.
