06 Feb 2012

Nick Oberthaler and Sara van der Heide exhibitions at KIOSK

The upcoming exhibition at KIOSK is a double-bill of solo presentations by artists Nick Oberthaler (1981, Austria, currently based in Brussels) and Sara van der Heide (1977, South Korean currently based in Amsterdam).

Both artists' practice is dominated by an examination of the fundamental potential of the pictorial medium. Oberthaler mainly focuses on the formal pictorial traditions, prying them open to widen their scope, where Van der Heide explores the status of the medium itself by looking at art-historical themes through a contemporary frame. The works on display in both cases testify of a specific sensitivity for the incorporeal aspects of painting, watercolours or drawing.

Nick Oberthaler brings his show 'Eventuality of an Attempt' to KIOSK. The attempt in question is one he will undertake to attain a condensed atmospheric experience through the use of mixed techniques on paper, sculpture and the integration of a spatial intervention. But the title also stresses the precariousness of this attempt and the idea that the exhibition's form will never be fully realized or 'complete'.
Oberthaler is fully aware of the traditional formal components of which the pictorial representation of a landscape is composed. Horizontal lines slide through several of his abstract geometric designs like so many limitless horizons in landscapes.
The same intention will also gear the treatment of KIOSK's architectural landscape: the central dome room accommodates four equal spaces created by a cruciform construction of gypsum board. Some of the wall boards function as temporary drawing and painting surfaces, others bear Oberthaler's pictorial 'canvases on paper' and 'paint drawings' that are mainly made with Indian ink, wax, pastels, gouache, photographic fragments and collages. These expand onto the mirror-covered wall construction to become three-dimensional temporary landscapes. The work thus explores the material and spatial boundaries of painting. With German romanticism as an undercurrent throughout 'Eventuality of an Attempt', the artist expresses the yearning to reach a similar level of the sublime through reduction.

Sara van der Heide presents a series of twenty watercolours under the title of 'Claim to Universality. Colour Theory Exercise 1-20' (2011). The series is based on a drawing from 1927 by Lena Bergner, a student of Paul Klee's at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The pictorial theories of this institute for the arts and of Paul Klee are analyzed in Van der Heide's watercolours in their wider, ideological and theoretical framework. The serial method and modernist ideals from the twenties and thirties constitute the basis for new, hybrid combinations.
Lena Bergner's original drawing is called 'Belichtung/Beschattung' and shows a small circle in the upper left from which several rays of light and colour start, to fan out in a larger circle. In her twenty variations on Bergner's drawing, Van der Heide sets out to examine the fundamental characteristics of watercolour painting such as colour and light. Her works are presented in a horizontal band in the cabinet adjacent to KIOSK's dome room, like a waving light beam of colour and shape. The space between the colour exercises is charged with 'cosmic energy', a concept Paul Klee used to point out that art and nature spring from the same source and are both part of a greater, cosmic whole.