INSIDE

from Michael Luther

August 30th – September 20th, 2008

Vernissage: Saturday, August 30th 2008 from 7 pm

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a catalogue will be published
---> download as pdf (app. 1MB)

Michael Luther’s painterly world is that of the minutely intimate. The main sources for his pictures are found in his most nearby surroundings such as his studio or even more extreme close-up, from the actual source for making pictures, namely the paints and art materials themselves.

For WILDE Gallery, Luther has created a series of paintings depicting the very spaces in which they are to be shown. These are paintings that literally feed upon themselves in a birth-life cycle, that expose their content as a mirror image of the hyper real.

Michael Luther, "Gallery (Desk)", Oil on canvas, 2008, 150cm x 200 cm

His approach is pondering rather than conceptual and he approaches the painted picture plane, as would any process-based artist, through meditation and at times through obsessive compulsion, which in a different age from ours may have been described as transcendental.

Michael Luther, installationview of "Gallery (Walls)", Oil on canvas, 2008, 300cm x 390 cm

"Michael Luther’s view of the gallery space is obsessively multiple. From detailed panoramic scenes of the gallery, with wrapped up paintings to close inspections of the empty sterile corner of the room. Luther is not only chartering the space – he is conquering it, making it his own, inhabiting it. The suite of canvasses becomes a peculiar search for traces of life, where there is none.

In the painting, Gallery (Desk), an oddly placed desk implies the absence of a sitter, while some paper wrapped canvasses seems to await the absentee to appear and unwrap them, inscribing such a figure into the scene much in the same way a Wilhelm Hammershøi interior invokes presence where there is none and emptiness where there is people.

Distancing himself further from the formalist realism of the Leipzig School, Luther employs classical conventions of light and mood to convey meaning – or even sentiment, if such an expression is not too archaic.” (Quote from the catalogue essay by Joakim Borda)

“INSIDE” by Michael Luther opens at WILDE Gallery on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 from 19h (7pm).

Michael Luther, "Gallery (Door)", Oil on canvas, 2008, 40cm x 30 cm

The exhibition dates are August 30th, 2008 until September 20th, 2008. Finissage on September 20th to coincide with the release of the Michael Luther catalogue with a critical essay by Joakim Borda.

Michael Luther - "Atelier (Fenster)", Oil on canvas, 2008, 40cm x 30cm

opening
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 from 7 pm

exhibition
August 30th – September 20th, 2008

opening hours
Tue– Sat | 12– 6 pm

location
WILDE GALLERY
Chausseestrasse 7
D-10115 Berlin
info@wilde-gallery.com
www.wilde-gallery.com

Michael Luther in front of "Corners", Oil on canvas, 2008, each 50cm x 50 cm