Still

CREATING AND DESTROYING PAINTINGS / The paintings of Secundino Hernández (b 1975, Spain) show the relationship between life as it is lived and as it is painted. The attempt to link both in a complete, human piece is at the core of his work – a never-ending search for an answer to resolve the conflict between reality and a work of art. He recently showed at Madrid ARCO 2012. The nuanced oil paintings of Rodney Dickson (b 1956, N Ireland) are made up of accretions of previous paintings and traces of imagery, now mostly obscured. This ruthless practice of constant creation and destruction imbues the work with life and history. Dickson recently returned from a residency in China, where he was entranced by the quality of mist on the landscape, using it as the basis for a new series of paintings. Dickson won the 2011 Pollock-Krasner Award.
  
PAUSE BUTTON / The legendary underground filmmaker Jeff Keen (1923 – 2012) worked as a postman in Brighton in the 1960s, making films in his spare time with family and friends in an ensemble cast. Embracing American Pop imagery, comics and later Punk, Keen painted and made films using a stop frame animation process. He often explored his experiences as a survivor of World War II, as well as the artist’s internal struggle. His films and paintings use invented characters and brands, such as Rayday Films, in a fractured narrative style. Judith Eisler (b 1962, USA) is currently Professor of Painting at University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work was included in ‘Painting of Modern Life’ at The Hayward Gallery in 2007. Now New York-based, the artist draws on film as source material, pressing the pause button, shooting the image with her camera, and then painting the still — in this case showing iconic actress Gloria Swanson. Matt Saunders (b 1975, USA) trained as a painter at Yale, lives in Berlin and is currently is teaching at Harvard. Inspired by archival television shows and avant-garde film, Saunders recasts this cinematographic iconography into paintings, themselves transformed into compelling photographs and animations. He had a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Chicago in 2010. 

 
STILL / Josephine Halvorson (b 1981, USA) works on site, where the paintings become testaments to the environment and time spent. She is currently at work on a series of paintings related to disused lumber extraction equipment near the Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee.  

'For this show I’d like to exhibit three or four paintings related to the same site. This greater commitment allows for a longer engagement with the object’s forms and histories and represents a slightly new direction for my work,' she says. One of her first paintings was exhibited in a group show, ‘Americanana,’ at New York’s Hunter College, alongside a barnacle-covered bronze butter churn by Robert Gober.
 
CURATOR / Peter Fleissig for five years curated exhibitions for Power House, Memphis. As a background to selecting the artists for this exhibition he read Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Map and the Territory’ 2012.