Group Show
Untitled Art Miami Beach
4 — 8 DEZ 2024
GOLESTANI is pleased to announce the participation at the 13th edition of Untitled Art Miami Beach with works from Siegfried Anzinger and John Shorb.
Opening reception
Tuesday, Dec 3, 10—7pm
Hours
Wed—Sat, 11—7pm
Sun, 11—5pm
12th Street and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach
booth #A38
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Implying a deliberately lyrical move, Anzinger is a master of the quick study that turns into a monumental image: a flash of gestures and drips will suddenly become a memorable rendering of a familiar reality, fraught with existential, even religious import. He moves easily between the impulsive and the meditative, pulling out all the stops in between—but suggest the depths of his roots in tradition. They also reflect his personal struggle to find faith and hope in spite of the skepticism that seems built into his gesture. There are precedents for Anzinger’s recent religiosity, or at least his exploration of traditional religious iconography, in earlier works; but in the artist’s most recent paintings, his concern with religious imagery seems to have become an obsession. Many of Anzinger’s works seem to carry the irrationality of Goya’s Black Paintings to an expressionistic extreme. This becomes explicit in a number of works bringing an animal into being: Indeed, animals have all the presence and majesty in Anzinger’s paintings; humans tend to fade into absence, or become shadows of themselves, when not becoming distorted monsters, as in certain early works.
Anzinger is a profoundly conservative painter, and there is a peculiar virtue in his conservativism. For all the urgency his gestures sometimes have and the macabre sexuality he can throw in our faces—he regards the object, however faded or forced it might seem, as indispensable and sacred. In a 1977 essay entitled “The Return of the Sacred?,” Daniel Bell pointed out that “the thread of culture—and religion—is memory,” and that memory at its most intense is a “space of wonder and awe” suggestive of the sacred. It is this intimate, auratic space, fraught with mystery yet limited to particular beings, that Anzinger tries to create in his works. —Donald Kuspit, Artforum
SIEGFRIED ANZINGER (b. 1953, Austrian) has held several notable national and international exhibitions such as the participation in Documenta 7 (1982) or representing the Austrian pavilion at the Biennale in Venice 1988. Considered as a major proponent of the "New Painting" in the beginning of the 1980s in Austria, Anzinger is one of the founders of the the "Neue Wilde" (the New Wild), a neo-expressionistic movement in Germany, which saw the re-emergence of expressive painting. Anzinger was awarded the Oskar-Kokoschka-Prize in 1986 and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts in 2003. His work is in the collections of the MoMA (New York City, US), Kolumba Museum (Cologne, DE), Belvedere (Vienna, AUS) and numerous other institutions. His influence extends to a young generation of artists as well, not only since his professorship for painting at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1998-2021). More of a support system than a teacher, Anzinger stands for the freedom of expression in art. Until today, he continues his search for new solutions in painting.
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GOLESTANI is pleased to present a new body of handmade paper works by John Shorb, entitled The Secret Book of John. The artist takes the title from a second-century Gnostic text, considered heretical in its time but not known again until the twentieth century. It describes Jesus giving “secret” knowledge to his disciple, John. In this new series, Shorb’s private journal entries of intimate, at times anonymous, encounters with men mix with entries from the Gnostic text. Written in the artist’s hand, the works reference men’s little black books and conversations in early online chatrooms—those open yet hidden textual spaces. Shorb’s approach physically enlarges and visually obscures these texts. His technique embodies ecstatic writing through the wet process of pulp painting that creates a fluidity of color and line wherein the text itself comes dripping out.
JOHN SHORB (b. 1978 in Joint Andrews Base, Maryland) studied film and literature at Carleton College and then received a Masters of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Shorb has had solo shows at the University of Mississippi Museum, Northeastern University, and Long Island University, and group shows at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Santa Clara University and Wright State University. He has completed residencies at Hambidge Center, Penland and Blue Mountain Center and was Executive Director at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY. His work is in public collections at the Brooks Museum of Art, LeBonheur Children's Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, Methodist Germantown Hospital, Germantown, Tennessee, the New York University Center for Spiritual Life, and the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses. John Shorb has received numerous awards for his work, including honors from the Fulbright Commission and the Brooklyn Arts Council.