Shadows / Highlights – Berlin based painter Axel Gerber exhibits at XYZ Gallery
„Perhaps it‘s good to take a leap. Not to mark time, but consistency and responsibility towards painting” or “Incorporating outside influences into the process of painting such as being exposed to urbanity - hearing weird sounds” - so reads notes from Axel Gerber’s Frankfurt years.
Spontaneity and chance are the creative principles that Axel Gerber borrowed from Western contemporary art. Through improvisations on landscape themes and experimenting with materials he came to adopt an open style of painting. Gerber applies thin pigments to paper and canvas, thereby achieving luminous tones, gradations of color and blurriness as well as accentuating the material structure of the medium. A sparse number of expansive lines, along with dots, splotches and planes arranged side by side and above one another with vistas into the more or less obscured, intensely colorful background, create the illusion of landscape. During the working process, bold gestures are often moderated or wiped off, vivid colors diluted and sections arranged in a staggered pattern by color space occasionally reversed – until the elements produce a coherent whole. Laid-on highlights of color complete the polycentric composition, which features spatial depth and seems to float. As if moving toward the viewer, the picture makes its presence felt.
Axel Gerber collects pictorial material that documents the phenomenon of accelerated, technologically-aided perception. He attempts to intensify the luminosity of colors and to incorporate multiple light sources in the picture. The bold use of chiaroscuro in the smallest of areas, as well as the alternation between matte and lustrous finishes, enhances the intensity. From the arsenal of urban forms Gerber appropriates gridded façades, bars, aggressive zigzags and splashy circles. Even the filth and ugliness are pictorially represented as splotches or roughly-worked sections. Axel Gerber is a contemporary German painter who seeks to reconcile opposites – city and nature, form and indistinctness, fine craftsmanship and brash gestures.
Axel Gerber, born in November 1978 in Zwickau, Germany, completed his basic studies at the Städelschule art academy in Frankfurt. He moved on to the Universität der Künste in Berlin where he studied under Professor Bernd Koberling.
His first solo show in 2003 was entitled No more less! – a profession of support for unrestrained, sensuous painting versus its conceptual reductionism. He subsequently exhibited new works in group shows of the booming gallery scene (Die Falltür zur armen Welt; Beton, Wurst und andere Teamgeister; Nacht der süßen Bienen) and in his second solo exhibition Schock & Schonung (2010); the offbeat titles reflect the change of tone in Berlin over the past decade.
Axel Gerber has been invited to Beijing by XYZ Gallery and has spent some inspiring weeks as “artist in residence” experiencing the special rhythm of Beijing.
based on "Where and how something new emerges" by Christian Hufen
