Patricia Sweetow Gallery

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to announce our solo exhibition, with German artist Markus Linnenbrink: too early and always and all over again.

Exhibition dates are November 3 through December 17, 2011.

Reception is Thursday, November 3, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

German artist Markus Linnenbrink is recognized for his dazzling exploration of material, process, and color. In this exhibition, too early and always and all over again, Linnenbrink will present new resin paintings, poured and coaxed into new forms, with sculpture.

Linnenbrink's new paintings are intuitive mediations between his air-brushed underpainting, and vertically poured bands of color.  The epoxy resin forms a tactile, textured surface saturated with various opacities of pigments, poured as vertical striping, or reverse painted in a hand-formed mold.

David Roth, SquareCylinder.com writes of Linnenbrink's approach to his medium and practice, " While the tonality of these works varies from pale to searing, our physical engagement with them remains constant. Throughout, the artist sidesteps logic, hierarchy or any sort of ordering when it comes to composition.  Thus, viewers are challenged to create their own coherence, which is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, depending on which portion of Linnenbrink’s oeuvre you’re looking at.

Kenneth Baker offers this insight, "Thoughts of the stripe paintings of Morris Louis (1912-1962) and Gene Davis (1920-1985) may arise. But Linnenbrink really belongs not to the color field lineage but within a much longer modernist research into the dialectic of intention and chance, of spontaneity and deliberation, in art practice."

Linnenbrink's sculpture has taken a dramatic shift from the rectangular shape, pushing the material into new morphologies. Taking form from a hand-built mold that distorts as material is cumulatively introduced, the sculpture transforms as it grows over several months. The result is a landscape of canyons, with rising layers of color, expanding to seven sprawling feet of folds, angles and peaks.

Linnenbrink garnered attention in the U.S. and Europe with wall paintings at the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, and Haus Esters, Krefeld. Over 50 works are in public collections which include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum; The Hague Ministry of Culture, the Netherlands; Museum Neue Galerie, Kassel; Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenburg; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel, and Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss.