Josephine Meckseper, Christoph Steinmeyer, Bernard Kahrmann
26 Apr 2003 - 31 May 2003
Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce the first one-person exhibitions in New York by Bernhard Kahrmann, Josephine Meckseper, and Christoph Steinmeyer in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. Each artist will occupy one of the gallery’s three rooms. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Saturday, April 26th, from 6 to 8 pm.
Christoph Steinmeyer’s paintings depict beautiful yet strangely unsettling women. Digitizing his photographic sources, Steinmeyer halves and mirrors images to create disturbingly symmetrical portraits. The resulting distortions produce mesmerizing faces of femmes fatales for the computer age. Although painted by hand, the surfaces suggest the technologically fabricated, reiterating the uncanny perfection of the images. Christoph Steinmeyer lives in Düsseldorf. Solo shows of his work were held in 2002 at Galerie Michael Janssen in Cologne, the Rheinisches Landes Museum in Bonn, the Künstlerverein Malkasten in Düsseldorf, and in the Förderprogramm for young artists at Art Cologne. He will be included in the group show, Torn Between Two Lovers, curated by Katharina Fritsch at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
Josephine Meckseper grew up in an artistic and politically radical family in Germany. Her conceptually-based installations that combine contemporary antiwar documentary with drawings, collages, and constructions that reference late modernist design and architecture recall both a personal past and a cultural history. Urgent political concerns overlap an interrogatory nostalgia in works such as a video of a recent demonstration in New York’s Central Park that mimics footage of Vietnam-era protests. Josephine Meckseper has had solo shows at Borgmann-Nathusius in Cologne and at Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart, and will be included in Nation at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. She lives in New York and is the editor and publisher of Fat magazine.
Bernhard Kahrmann’s installation, In Between, projects images of white-on-black abstract grids, modernist architecture at night, artificially lit domestic interiors, and psychologically suggestive portraits on and through a multistoried minimalist construction made of translucent acrylic. Kahrmann orchestrates slide projectors to cycle through a quasi-cinematic progression in which image and abstraction, light and dark, and even the sound of the mechanisms contributes to a the suggestion of a moody and enigmatic narrative. Bernhard Kahrmann is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has shown in Stuttgart at Galerie Reinhard Hauff and in Gdansk at Łaznia, Centre for Contemporary Art. In Between was featured as a solo project in the Förderprogramm of the 2002 art fair in Cologne.
Bernhard Kahrmann’s installation is sponsored in part by Eastman Kodak and Burkhardt Leitner constructiv.