BERNHEIM x ADZ Gallery: group show

Oliver Bak

Katrine Bobek

Joanne Burke

Anders Davidsen

Justin De Verteuil

David Flaugher

Tomas Leth

Tali Levi

Shota Nakamura

Eli Ping

Ding Shilun

Shiwen Wang

Bernheim invites the Lisbon based gallery ADZ to collaborate in a joint exhibition at its Zurich location. This joint showcase revolves around shared aesthetics, featuring artists from diverse backgrounds, with each bringing distinct perspectives, techniques, and horizons to collectively explore the evolution of life. Centered on mythological themes and art historical references, the non-objective works presented by all the artists in this exhibition encourage viewers to seek the sublime within the world that surrounds us.

 

Oliver Bak’s paintings display ethereal Arcadian scenes with figures hidden in idle playfulness amid falling blossom. His characters dance between their dual capacity for joyousness and cruelty. Tomas Leth’s work subdues its audience, captivating them with strange colour associations, and motifs at the limit between figuration and abstraction. In another iteration of landscape painting, Anders Davidsen works from memory to create repeated paintings of the sun or the moon rising and setting on the sea, as the time between night and day, a liminal space where we stand before ourselves. Finding moments when light and darkness coalesce, Shiwen Wang paints with pigments that are reminiscent of modern Deutsch painting but with the lightness of Chinese ink, disrupting an order we seem to have accepted. Concerned with this idea of duality and transfiguration, Joanne Burke through a labour intensive process of whittling, melting, and reworking, creates metallic sculptures that poses a sense of timelessness through their and ancient and modern forms. 

 

Katrine Bobek plays upon the folklore and dream like imagery through dense layers of vibrant paint. Through her almost pointillist approach, she lets her figures play within landscapes distilled under vibrant vistas. Similarly, Ding Shilun draws up on Asian mysticism to create figures and scenarios entirely his own. His figures take on a life that reveal a violence that is at first sight hidden beneath the beauty of the painting. In similar ways, Shota Nakamura presents contemplative paintings, figure in gardens, painted intuitively absorbing us in nature. Justin de Verteuil’s work is informed in an almost diaristic fashion, whilst exploring sensory depictions of the human psyche. Through shared moments of sensitivity, his figures pose languidly within ambiguous architectural scenes.

 

David Flaugher’s prowess resides in his taking of the most simple still lives imagery, flowers, tables, a willow tree, where he strips the colour and the images to make it almost imperceptible, instead the viewer must focus on the handling of the paint, of the layers and ultimately on the meaning we derive from that. Eli Ping is invested in how objects function as phenomena, their forms documenting their own becoming. In the same way, Tali Levi’s work explores visions of nature, as if naturally formed, the paintings reflect shining waves and mother-of-pearl lava. 

 

Capturing the essence of these artworks proves challenging, as the emotions they evoke defy easy description. When immersed in the gallery space, one experiences a profound sentiment, surrounded by images that are immediately familiar and with palettes reminiscent of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters 'Les Nabis'. However, each piece stands alone in its uniqueness, both in artistic language and color combination. Most significantly, these works offer a transformative revelation, encouraging viewers to perceive the world and their inner selves in a fresh and enlightening manner.