Christoph Steinmeyer

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce exhibitions of new work by Christoph Steinmeyer and Chris Sauter in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, November 20, from six to eight pm.

In the Main Gallery, Christoph Steinmeyer’s new canvases essay the traditional painting subjects of still lifes and interiors. Familiar yet strange, the objects Steinmeyer depicts seem on the verge of dissolution; forms appear to waver, and figure melts with ground like mirages caused by desert heat. Hallucinogenic images, these paintings reimagine art-historical genres as if through a drug-induced dream or the textured glass of a shower door.

Like his previous series of uncannily symmetrical portraits of women, Steinmeyer’s new images are assembled from a large repertoire of component parts, morphed and distorted with the aid of a computer. Large still lifes of flowers and fruit have as their source Old Master paintings from centuries past. The interiors come from classics of twentieth-century cinema: Marnie is a composite drawn from a number of scenes in Hitchcock’s eponymous film, the creepy room rendered in Rose from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Steinmeyer’s technique seems to conflate the tension and suspense of the films into a single image, compressing the narrative, characters, and plot into a still. The empty interior somehow retains the psychological charge of the movie. The flowers and fruit of the artist’s still lifes translate the florid fervor and aspects of the memento mori of the originals (decay and rot, flies and worms in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings) into insinuations of a fevered death of the image, a kind of demise of the picture’s capacity to represent.

Christoph Steinmeyer lives and works in Düsseldorf. This will be his first solo exhibition in New York. His paintings were featured in a project room at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2003 and have been included in group shows at Matthew Marks, Andrea Rosen, and C&M Arts. One-man show of his work have been held at Galerie Michael Janssen in Cologne, The Happy Lion in Los Angeles, and the CampusGalerie at the Universität Bayreuth.

Just Married, an installation by Chris Sauter in Gallery 2, will comprise a bed with a system of canyons carved into its foam mattress. Tiny dams, telephone poles, and electrical towers punctuate this Lilliputian expanse with the evidence of humanity’s presence. A series of drawings on painted panels contrast brooding, abstract skies with finely limned structures that echo those on the bed. Sauter’s work explores the correspondences between interior and exterior space, between a domestic topography and the vast landscape of the American West. Just Married seems to equate the psycho-sexual drama of intimate life with the geographic and socio-political existence of public lands, articulating the moody poetry of each.

Chris Sauter lives and works in San Antonio. In 1999 he was an artist-in-residence at ArtPace. His work has been seen in group exhibitions at the San Antonio Museum of Art, the McNay Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and Elizabeth Dee Gallery. This is his first solo project in New York.