WILDE Gallery

Held once a year, the INVENTORY # project becomes the file under which WILDE Gallery mounts investigative displays of its gallery artists. Each INVENTORY show sets out to explore the relationships created within its own community of artists and the dialogue between their works.

For the second installment of INVENTORY #, Wilde Gallery will introduce a guest artist among it's community of gallery artists. This year we present the work of Spanish painter Antonio Santín..

Kenno APATRIDA
Kenno Apatrida, originally from South America, has been exiled in Berlin for the past two decades and has been part of the city's radical creative transformation. His works, which go against the tide of aloof post modernity, are phantasmagorical, spiritual and transcendental, humorous and at times painfully genuine. Apatrida's practice refers to philosophical precursors ranging from shamanistic rituals to the nightmares of William Blake and Henry Füseli, William Burroughs, political junk from the former GDR and Zen Buddhism. Collected from various squats and abandoned flats in Berlin, the "cultural detritus" Apatrida incorporates in his work are re-inscribed and re-positioned, undergoing an alchemical process with the results returned to us as icons of a spirituality specific to our modern age.

John BROWN
Canadian artist Brown's pictures are literally survivors of their own making. The artist negotiates between formalism and abstraction where everything is exchangeable in the processes of excavating the final picture from layers upon layers of reference. Deceptive in their expressionist qualities, Brown's compositions are actually the laborious result of conscientious investigations of color and form, that the artist may take up to a year to complete. A monograph of his work was recently published by MOCCA in Toronto, recording his retrospective show The Visceral Thing. The book will be available from the gallery from August 23rd.

Said BAAL
Berlin based Lebanese artist BAAL's work is concerned with the act of remembrance and investigates the relationships of displacement through the painterly medium. His pictures depict accumulations of debris in various compositions that re-enacts the idea of loss, subordination and power relationships. Personal belongings, piles of luggage, heaps of clothes emerge from BAAL's pictures as an embodiment of the anonymous refugee. A refugee that has lost everything, but where memory can offer not only salvation but also deliverance.

EVOL
EVOL's artistic interests have focused on the overlooked and the refuse of urban society. Working with labour-intensive stencils, his imagery is traced onto salvaged wood or bits of cardboard, offering visual comments and thoughts that remind us of the failure of modernism and its visions of an architectural utopia. EVOL's work will appear at OSTRALE'09 taking place in Dresden from mid-August.


Alexei KOSTROMA
Russian born Berlin based artist Kostroma has set out Five conceptual limitations that he abides by. Feathers, Egg Shells, Yellow Pigments, Hair and Figures. These seemingly arbitrary selections create a universe of its own and have offered the artist a platform onto which he has applied theories of material cognition, spectral refraction of light and ideas of chaos theory. The works manifest themselves as ensembles of interlocking and interdependent sources to the universal forces of creativity. Alexei Kostroma is included in the Moscow Biennale'09 taking place at The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture from September 25th.

John NOESTHEDEN
Canadian artist Noestheden's representations of starry skies, supernovas and meteors draw from quantum physics, the background noise of the universe and the unspoken spirituality of things. His choices of material are literally glittering from thousands of silver crystals suggesting a conceptual approach to the organisation of matter into poetry.

Ricardo OKARANZA
Basque born Okaranza's approach to photography is entirely abstract and open ended. His pictures are always taken at night and although they suggest representational figuration, unavoidable through a camera lens and its mechanical recording of the image, the subjects portrayed are always considered for their formalism alone. Light sources become dots, shadows become lines and so on. Okaranza does not offer any pictorial narrative although the images may suggest so and if depicted so, it is entirely coincidental.

PISA73
Berlin based PISA73's artistic approach is sometimes blatantly derisive and his pictures are harsh but also radiate a sense of unintentional beauty. The artists' use of instant recognition becomes visible with iconic brands and repositioned advertisements that are processed to form new meaning. PISA73's works are a testament to a time of bloated romantic eclecticism, asking not what beauty is, but what beauty does - in the service of turbo capitalism, corporate manipulation, misuse of power and state control.

Stefan SAFFER
Saffer's personal art practice varies from paper-cut outs to folded works from Objects and Mobiles to large installations. He recently worked on the idea to introduce Berthold Brecht's "Verfremdunsgeffekt", freely translated: (alienation effect) to fine arts. The artist continuously tries to explore the possibilities of Improvisation in Art as a parallel experiment to Music and its use of it.

Antonio SANTÍN
Spanish born Antonio Santín is the guest artist of INVENTORY#2 for 2009. Although the artists' painterly approach is traditional, his subjects are photo based and at times evoke a digital camera rendering, which brings to his pictures a proof of the struggles with contemporary subjectivity and the challenges of defining meaning where there might only be superficiality. Santín's paintings are sculptural, which is evident in the ways that the brushstrokes take on a three dimensional treatment, reducing the paint to graduated matter that is carved away to excavate the inner being of the subject.

Madeline STILLWELL
Performance artist Madeline Stillwell chooses her materials with an inherent disregard for comfort. The objects she uses to construct her stage, such as industrial duct-tape, shards of splintered wood, wire fences and rusted metal, are all collected on-site and become the artist's ironic playground, signifying quite literally the detritus of modern society and, metaphorically, the neglected recesses of the psyche. Her performances recall the legacy and concerns of early feminist performance work, specifically the pathos of self-inflicted pain in the public arena, the symbolism of ritualistic gesture and the connotations of the conscious performance.

Michael STECKY
Originally a composer, Stecky is carrying over his interests in the act of hearing to the act of seeing. His work in video and painting is concerned with the indexical mark and by pushing its' limits he investigates the boundaries of representation and authenticity and tries to find the point where it all collapses. Recent work is an interactive "art-therapy" website, which is a self-organising structure onto which viewers can compose their own treatments.

Balint ZSAKO
New York based Zsako has created a pictorial world inhabited by a myriad of figures that display the cyclical nature of being. A profound understanding of pattern and symbolism helps the artist to explore his subjects, either when they are enacted as monsters or fairies occupied in spiritual merging or by copulating in impossible positions to give birth to trees, birds or fantastical machinery that, in his world, may unveil the mysteries of creation and our place in the universe.

 Johannes ZITS
A great artistic concern of Toronto based artist Zits, is the idea of appearance and vulnerability in the spaces between the private and public. Working in video and multi-media as well as painting, his recent imagery recalls the uneasiness in which we deal with nudity. The artist draws his pictorial commentaries from the cultural and legal restrictions that are applied to exclude us from exploring ourselves as private beings in the public domain.