Christian Ehrentraut

Shannon Finley

03 Sep - 22 Oct 2011

© Shannon Finley
terror field, 2011
acrylic on canvas
190 x 220 cm
SHANNON FINLEY
Encrypted and Lost
3 September - 22 October, 2011

We are pleased to invite you to the opening reception of „Encrypted and Lost“, the second solo exhibition by the Canadian artist Shannon Finley at the Galerie Christian Ehrentraut.

The single color-saturated segments and the numerous layers in Finley‘s paintings are precisely assembled to geometrically abstracted forms. The ten new works make the consistent developement of his work clear: crystaline webs are superimposed by pulsating veils of color and are just visible because of their relief structures. The bright and pure color of earlier works is hardly visible under the resonating pallet knife-applied layers of acrylic paint. The prismatic spaces and figures seem mercurial, resembling x-rays or Kirlian ghost-photography, they are hard to get hold of and turned darker. In the painting‘s titles such as „Echo“, „Voider“ or „Gone Forever“, one can already get a sense of what is obvious on the canvases: Finley detroys big parts of the paintings, wipes parts off or overpaints them. Yet still, there are references both to the phantastical „crystal utopias“ of German classical modernism as well as to the white noise of the world wide web.

Shannon Finley was born in Ontario, Canada in 1974 and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1993 - 1999) and at the Cooper Union, New York (1997). In 2007, he moved to Berlin where he currently lives and works. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue including an essay by David Hunt and published by LUBOK Verlag.
 

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