Nicole Gnesa Galerie
PHILIP GRÖZINGER: IF
22 Apr 2021 – 15 Jun 2021
Nicole Gnesa is very proud to present IF, Philip Grözinger's second solo exhibition in Munich. In addition to the analogue exhibition, for the first time an exhibition will be presented in a completely digital format.
Next to painting and drawing, the exhibition will focus on the textile work Daisy Bell Newly Found, which was machine-processed from the video Daisy Bell created by an AI according to parameters by Philip Grözinger.
IF is accompanied by the monograph of the same name with essays by Larissa Kikol and Marc Wellmann, which has just been published by Hirmer Publishers.
Parts of the opening will be streamed live and interactively on Instagram (instagram.com/nicolegnesa). Philip Grözinger will be present at the gallery on April 22, 2021.
The exhibition and the publication are supported by the 'Stiftung Kunstfonds'.
„Philip Grözinger’s paintings are actually pictures for churches or cathedrals. They should be in Rome.
By saying this I am not referring to the recent trend of exhibiting contemporary artists in sacred spaces so as to fill the forgotten emptiness with new life and simultaneously charge – or confront – their works with a spiritual aura, yet another way of glorifying art. No, churches should not lend Grözinger’s painting a new level of effectiveness, nor should his painting enhance their social function as cultural spaces. Grözinger’s pictures are already a door into another, heavenly world, at first glance so exceptional that in every detail they fulfil the functions of narrative, iconographic, sacred art. An appropriate religion would still have to be invented, of course, but once it were, there would be churches for its adherents, and Grözinger would be the first to be called upon to paint their walls, ceilings and altarpieces.
Even in the Florentine school, exalted narrative strands, events and lives were represented in heaven. Michelangelo’s heaven in the Sistine Chapel accommodates all the drama of the Last Judgement. Clouds form rocks on which souls congregate, crowd into a mass and function within it. (...) On other clouds additional instruments of torture stand ready: wheels, hooks, saws and wooden mallets.
In Grözinger’s heavenly pictures, instruments of torture are replaced by playthings. Here the rocklike clouds become colourful planets, heaven a universe. After the Last Judgement it is time for play. And belief in this extraterrestrial world, in the beyond, seems to play an equally major role.
(...) Let us pass through this door and experience Grözinger’s worlds in all their moods and logical activities familiar from art history. These settings lead from Romanticism and solitude to surreal transformations to science fiction and on to gamification and play. And perhaps the vanishing points in the beyond lie closer than we might first suppose.“
excerpt of the essay: Larissa Kikol, Looking Upward. On Philip Grözinger’s Planetary System of Freedom, Solitude and Play, in: IF, ed. by Nicole Gnesa, Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2021
We are really looking forward to your visit. Please contact +49 172 / 5943484 or info@nicolegnesa.com to make your appointment to meet Philip Grözinger at the opening on 22 April, or to visit the exhibition until June 12, 2021.
Covid19 protection regulations apply.
