Udo Nöger: Me Waters
Fassbender Gallery, Chicago
May 4 - June 2, 2001
Fassbender Gallery presents Me Waters, a body of paintings and drawings by German artist Udo Nöger. In these newest artworks, the artist continues his ethereal and dreamy investigation of the human figure and landscape. In a palette that is deceptively simple (but in reality contains a vast tonal range), Udo Nöger portrays shadows, and shadows of shadows. Working with many layers of translucent and gauzy fabric, the artist creates scrims that owe much to stage design and theatrical lighting. He overlays canvases of varying density, so that the surrounding light may pass through it again and again; bouncing back and forth and finally out to the viewer. In this way, these pictures contain and give off a tremendous amount of luminosity. By laying and overlaying stretched layers of canvas, gauze and muslin, the artist traps light so that we may view it at a more leisurely pace.
From a distance, Udo Nöger’s canvases appear to be blank. They are white on white. As the viewer draws closer, ghost images begin to come into view. Figures and disembodied heads hover among the shadows. It is these human silhouettes cut out of the canvas that allow light to move in and out of the paintings. The artist additionally soaks the canvases in mineral oil to make them even more translucent in spots. In this way, the artist retains the barest hint of a human presence in these highly abstracted works. These paintings and drawings seem to bear the imprint of people, rather than directly portraying them. They are afterimages. We are unsure whether they are contained within our eyes, or physically present before us.
At the same time, Fassbender Gallery’s Project Room features a group exhibition of new works by gallery artists.
FASSBENDER GALLERY
835 W. Washington, Chicago, IL 60607
www.fassbendergallery.com
