PAUL SCHWER
The Shape of Things
to Come
Curated by Professor
Stephan Berg, Director, Kunstmuseum Bonn
Private View
9 April 18.30-21.00
Exhibition
10 April – 16 May
2015
press release
Pi Artworks London is
pleased to announce Paul Schwer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Over the last year Schwer
has had majour solo exhibitions at Leopold Hoesch Museum and
Kunstverein Ruhr
Germany and IKOB in Belgium, though this is his first in the UK.
The Shape of Things to
Come features the artist’s arresting plexiglass sculptures
alongside an
intervention on the gallery’s floor and walls.
Schwer is a painters’
painter, concerning himself solely with the relationship between colour, space,
light,
and movement. His
work, however, is far removed from the traditional two-dimensional canvas.
With a profoundly
spatialized mode of painting Schwer produces sculptural installations charged
with light and colour
that express an
imploding impulse. He begins with flat Plexiglas plates painted with
broad-brush strokes of coloured
pigment. Then, in one
transient moment, through high heat and considerable force, they are spun,
twisted, and folded
into complex
labyrinthine forms. With this gesture, the two-dimensional picture plane is transformed
into a three
dimensional body of
colour that captures the performativity of its making. Schwer’s paintings
transform into dynamic
sculptures that
appear to expand like evolving creatures on the verge of a luminous burst. The
work reflects
a tendency in
contemporary painting praxis to move beyond the two-dimensional plane, and
situate itself
within the context of
postmodern obsessions with acceleration and urbanity.
The inspiration for
his intervention at Pi Artworks London is a photograph taken of a pergola in
Istanbul.
The decorative
archway is transposed into a spatial drawing in black dye covering the floor
and walls of the gallery
with a web of fine,
silver lines. Clusters of fluorescent tubes, wires, pigmented latex and warped
polyester cascades
from the ceiling. The
structure aggressively colonises the gallery with colourful tentacles,
transforming it with
its luminous presence. Nestled within, are Schwer’s plexiglas sculptures
that punctuate the
space like nodes of frozen liquid in a chaotic storm; the shape of things to
come.
Pi ARTWORKS London
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Pi ARTWORKS Istanbul
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Tel: +90 212 293 71
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