Barbara Seiler

Barbara Seiler Gallery is proud to present works by Michiel Ceulers, Mark Hagen and Alexander Lieck in the gallery’s first group show focusing specifically on painting. The exhibition works as a survey of emergent developments in painting and studio practice emphasizing the ever-shifting role of the painter in contemporary art and culture. It posits painting today, abstract for the most part, as a means, not an end. Painting is a process that is rooted in the studio yet receptive to the world. The three vastly emerging artists freely pursue new languages of abstraction and methods of making, at times crossing paths with other mediums and broaching issues with the history of painting and the discipline of art history.

Setting off from a basic and buoyant beginning, Michiel Ceulers (*1986, Belgium) has spent many long nights with painting: stripping it down, lovingly caressing it, kicking it around the room, manhandling it so that one can witness every bruise and tear, each scrape and scratch, the sprays and the many brushstrokes he’s dragged across its surface. When the painting finally leaves the studio for the white walls of the gallery, it bears all the marks of its double-edged encounter with the artist. Ceulers strips the medium down to the core freeing it from the weight and connotations of thousands of years as a means to find out what the act of painting can presently and personally mean. Ceulers endeavors to renovate the ancient practice of painting with works wearing proudly their labors. A rapid rigor reveals itself, unwinding through stripes and grids leaving the paintings at the end of the process curiously tender and refreshingly human. In works such as ‘Renewal of memories of moments of perfection / The fall of the god’, 2013 or ‘Form die Sprachen erinnert aber nicht in der Sprache eingebettet ist (Raum für Metapher)’, 2013 show traces of detaching and reattaching the canvas from the stretcher thereby creating rough, folded, cleft surfaces thus achieving a literal yet still appreciative deconstruction of painting.

Temporal impossibility lies at the heart of Mark Hagen’s (*1972, United States) work. Be it through his use of unstable materials or his practice involving anachronism, he provokes chance while at the same time contradicting it. The continuity of forms through history, and their relatively limited repertory are among the major issues, of Hagen’s work. Also, the artist shows a profound fondness of refuting chronologies by altering their order. This applies in the titles he gives to his works, which, for the most part, open with a “To Be Titled” completed by a brief categorization in brackets. Hagen’s paintings have evolved from a hard-edged geometry to a series of ‘Gradient’ paintings, in which familiar geometric forms are visible close up, but are read from a distance read as black and white gradient transitions. By fusing minimalistic forms with material like burlap – a base that is one of the earliest forms of canvas, whose wavering and imperfections can be seen quite clearly due to the nature of the material – Hagen reclaims both forms and materials through his works. Hagen’s work might be set up according to relating principles of repetition and variation, yet it also embraces the notion of multi-layered works that proudly beat traces from their process of creation.

Alexander Lieck’s (*1967, Germany) adherence to the ancient and persistent physical medium of the painted picture frame with his corrections and imperfect surfaces of color probably ultimately implies a conservative resistance to the advance of abstraction as a comparable abstract image of economic processes. Not without reason, his works can be understood as cynicism towards a certain kind of abstraction in the tradition Yves Klein. Lieck’s images, representatives of failure. His works have blotches and streaks of color can be read as half-finished and sometimes shy even before the abstraction itself. They resist the language as a medium and bring it in each image a different argument as they combine the individual with universal, colors with lines, the outside with interiority.