First exhibition of the work of the young German painter CHRISTOPH WEDDING, born in 1967, at Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard in Paris.
Christoph Wedding’s pictures are painted directly on supports made of medium with rectangular shapes and rounded corners and hollows. Multiple coats in thin, translucent layers are painted over one another like a series of veils of different colours. In this way the artist manages to create an illusion of infinite depth.
Most of his paintings combine curves and straight lines with sharp shapes in forceful compositions. The “veils”, like the elliptical lines, are painted in a single stroke of a wide brush, allowing no correction. The artist uses straight lines as often as curves in his compositions. Curves meeting straight lines produce the sharp edges. The dynamics of the lines and transparency of the paint bring to mind the architectural sculptures of Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Straight lines are all either vertical or horizontal, this geometrical structuring being counterbalanced by the potentially more organic and chaotic play of fluid curves. This relationship between hardness and sensuality in uncompromising coexistence is quite disturbing to the viewer.
Christoph Wedding combines two different aesthetic and philosophical approaches in the same picture – one marked by rigour, order and a search for finality, the other more organic, pantheistic and anarchic. Between these two extremes, Christoph Wedding’s paintings achieve a state of precarious balance and tense coexistence.
In 2003 Christoph Wedding was one of the artists shown in the New Abstract Painting exhibition at the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen, and has had a one man show at the Kunstverein, Heilbronn. Galerie Aurel Scheibler presented a Christoph Wedding one man show in FIAC 2003.
CHRISTOPH WEDDING, Malerei
11 September – 19 October 2004
Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard
51-53, rue Saint-Louis en l’Ile
75004 PARIS
