Our exhibition Sculptural.Painting. is extended and open by individual appointment until Friday, 30 April. We warmly invite you to book a time slot here or at +49-174-490 96 35.

Sculptural.Painting.: Thematic group exhibition around the work of Jussi Niva, the winner of our ART MATTERS Open Call last April. We present four other artists whose work is situated in the field of tension between sculpture and painting: Bram Braam, Árpád Forgó, Ted Larsen and Ji Eun Lee.

Online vernissage on Friday, 22 January at 6pm

Due to current lockdown regulations, the opening of our first major group exhibition in the new year will take place without an audience on site, but exclusively online on our website and Instagram feed.

About the exhibition:

Sculptural.Painting.

The new group exhibition at Galerie Biesenbach – initially exclusively online from 22 January 6pm – highlights artistic processes that address a hybridisation of painting and sculpture.

With a deliberate focus on wall-based works, we present sculptural forms in which the boundaries between painting and sculpture are explored, blurred and suspended. Because these objects, while possessing dimensional qualities, inhabit the wall, a place traditionally occupied by painting, they reference painting yet function beyond it. Wall sculptures hold the possibility of making things appear or disappear depending on where one stands in relation to the work. Painting doesn't work that way; no matter where you stand, the painting will always look essentially the same. Where painting ends and sculpture begins....

About the artists:

Bram Braam (*1980 in the Netherlands, lives and works in Berlin) focuses his artistic practice on assemblage-like objects between painting and wall sculpture. He deals with architecture and the constant change of our environment by looking at public space through the eye of a sculptor. Within this concept, Braam's works revolve around recycled materials, found objects, parts of furniture and fragments of city walls that serve him for his compositions.

Árpád Forgó (*1972 in Budapest, lives and works there) is interested in experimental painting, in the question of expanding the interpretation of non-figurative panel painting by maintaining its painterly character and exploring the boundary between painting and sculpture. His shaped canvas works are constructed from a predefined modular system, with structure, form, dimensions and rhythm, as well as planar and spatial relationships, central to his practice.

Ted Larsen (*1964 in the USA, lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico) considers his work as "painting". While the artist rejects the brush, he does not reject painting itself, and thus works with pre-painted surfaces that allow him to conceptually appropriate the paint as his "own colour". By covering three-dimensional forms with these pre-painted surfaces, they become shaped paintings and raise the question of where painting ends and sculpture begins.

Ji Eun Lee (*1984 in Seoul, lives and works in Bayreuth) combines the advantages of sculptural work with those of hanging works in her relief-like objects. Using various materials, the artist explores the possibilities of a visualisation of spatiality that questions the relationship between inside and outside. The structures created most recently by hollowing out and carving wood act like visual essays between sculpture and painting. The aim is to have a painterly effect with a fine poetic style on the massive material.

Jussi Niva (*1966 in Pello, Finland, lives and works in Helsinki) works in parallel on painted, two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional objects in order to detach the experience of three-dimensionality from the "modelled form" and instead connect it with the surface of the painting. His wall sculptures – two-dimensionally painted surfaces on cut and fold geometry made of solid wood – are a kind of intervention, they push into space, but conversely they also project space.

On the wall or in the room?

Stéphane Biesenbach presents five artists under the motto "Sculpture or Painting"

by Heidrun Wirth in Kölnische Rundschau, 2.2.2021

Sculpture or painting? What is that small work of art by Ted Larsen, only 20 cm high, protruding eleven centimetres from the wall in yellow cubes? The yellow surfaces correspond in a frontal view with the blue staircase stringers, which then emerge when viewed from the side. This "sculpture" hangs on the wall like a picture, carefully provided with smooth colour surfaces, but still marked by traces of work.

Of course, now at the latest one sees that works of art always want to be seen in the original, especially when they change their radiance with every step the viewer takes in the room. But nevertheless, the present virtual presentation of this group exhibition at Stéphane Biesenbach's offers insights, perhaps not without anticipation of a later encounter "in the flesh".

From Finland to Hungary
Under the title "Sculptural.Painting.", the exhibition features the work of four male artists and one female artist who are spread across the globe in terms of their origins and yet all seem to pose the same question: When three-dimensional objects are attached to the wall, what are the hybrid artworks now – sculptures or paintings?

In any case, fascinating eye-catchers presented in varied hangings.

And one can see: The old argument about the end of the panel picture in painting is far from over.

In all five positions, the desire for materials is added to the diversity of forms. This is the case with Ted Larsen, who has created the work described above entitled "False Fact" with salvaged steel, plywood, silicone, vulcanised rubber and hardware.

While Larsen uses found materials, Jussi Niva, born in Finland in 1966, paints folded objects of wood – protruding up to twenty centimetres from the wall – with oil paints in further geometric divisions. The structures created by the brush strokes and the grain, where the wood is not painted, look like a fine drawing.

Bram Braam, born in the Netherlands in 1980, places new compact pictorial elements on top of underlying pictures and thus works with the appeal of the (semi-)concealed. In this way he seems to take up the theme of the multi-layered nature of the wall, already known in the Romantic period, practised in the Romanesque churches in rows of round arches (lesenes or pilaster strips). His works often consist of old materials and combine the exact and the deliquescent.

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"Viewing Room"

Parallel to this exhibition, Stéphane Biesenbach has set up a virtual "Viewing Room" until 21 February, offering works on paper by the Japanese artist Hideaki Yamanobe – in a price range from 800 to 2.850,- €. www.galerie-biesenbach.de/de/online

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In fine "painterly" transitions, the Hungarian Árpád Forgó, born in Budapest in 1972, explores the boundaries to the three-dimensional with monochrome acrylic painting. Tautly stretched segments of canvas bulge out slightly, about 4 cm wide, and allow the finest shades of colour to emerge in the curvatures.

Ji Eun Lee, born in Seoul in 1984, works in a completely different way. Her structures, carved in walnut or limewood, are reminiscent of basketwork and given fine highlights by the oiled finish. Sometimes carved ovals are flawlessly polished, sometimes the traces of the carving iron form fine structures. Here, too, there is no more than seven centimetres away from the wall.

The varied hanging of these original works of art, which "inhabit" the walls, can already be viewed beautifully on the internet.

"Sculptural.Painting." runs until 6 March, but is expected to be extended into May, so there is still a chance to view it in the gallery space (Zeughausstrasse 26. 1st floor). Prices range from 850 to 16.000,- €. www.galerie-biesenbach.de