Tobias Pils: Balancing & Coupling
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Through February 12, 2021
David Kordansky Gallery presents Tobias Pils: Balancing and Coupling, an online solo exhibition featuring two new paintings by the Vienna-based artist.
Tobias Pils produces paintings that are bracingly contemporary. The two paintings featured in this in-depth look at Tobias Pils’ work—Balancing and Coupling 1—speak in both metaphoric as well as concrete terms to the fullest range of issues animating the medium. This includes the irresolvable tensions between figuration and abstraction and the ongoing dilemmas about where and how painting functions on individual and collective levels. But the two works also focus attention on the contemporary moment in even more immediate ways, since they arise from a heightened sense of how a painting emerges in real time, brushstroke by brushstroke, thought by thought, and feeling by feeling. The paintings exemplify Tobias Pils’ approach to each aspect of his process as an opportunity for inquiry. They demonstrate, for instance, how Tobias Pils, through confining himself to a grisaille palette, is able to evoke subtleties that get to the core of what it means to paint with color. Balancing, with its dark background and looming lunar presence, is a "night" painting while Coupling 1 may be considered a "daytime" one with its frank depiction of bodies engaged in acts of communion that could be physical, spiritual, or ritual. Full of hybrid beings and allegorical landscapes, as well as passages of dissonant abstraction and subtle brushwork, Tobias Pils’ new work evokes the paradoxes that characterize life, consciousness, and art as vital, unpredictable phenomena.
David Kordansky Gallery will show a solo presentation of new works by Pils at Frieze New York, May 5 – 9, 2021.
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019
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