Johannes Girardoni | Undisclosed: Quint Contemporary Art: 7739 Drury Lane
Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to exhibit new works by artist Johannes Girardoni. This will be the first solo exhibition for the New York based artist at Quint Contemporary Art. The exhibition opens on October 23 and will run through November 14 , 2009. There will be a public reception on Friday, October 23rd from 6 to 8PM.
Johannes Girardoni is an Austrian-born, American-based sculptor and installation artist. Girardoni’s works are reductive investigations at the intersection of sculpture and painting, through which he explores the continuously shifting relationship between reality and image. His material vocabulary – found wood, plywood, wax, pigment, light, enamel and plexiglass - and its physical constellation, become both the carrier of an explicitly painterly event, while also being the foundation of an immaterial phenomenon. His orchestration of material and light, presence and absence, things found and things formed, all resist clear fixation, thereby maintaining and creating works with their own non-derivable reality.
Girardoni’s sculptures are most clearly revealed in the contrast of his preferred working materials, beeswax and wood. Originally a painter, Girardoni took inspiration from the encaustic works of Jasper Johns and Brice Marden to launch his own attempts with wax as a binding agent for color pigments at the beginning of the 1990s.
The works presented in this exhibition showcase a new development in Girardoni’s work that focuses on the application of paint as physical material. The works loosely fall into two groups: Structured Paintings and Exposed Icons. In the first, bright, bold enamels are encapsulated in wood and plexiglass structures that reveal a playful yet structured tension. The architecture of these works is derived from Girardoni’s exploration of allowing paint to form itself, leaving traces of a work’s own making out in the open. The second group is a series of over-painted photographs. As Girardoni describes it, the photographs “are built from double exposures of backsides of advertising billboards, then partially digitally deconstructed, then physically over- painted.” Both bodies of work represent a delicate balancing act between presence and absence.
Girardoni’s works have been exhibited and acquired by numerous public and private collections, including the Fogg Art Museum, the Ludwig Museum, Germany, and the Progressive Art Collection. Girardoni’s work has received critical acclaim in Sculpture Magazine, the New York Times, ArtNews, Arts Magazine, and NY ARTS amongst others.
Johannes Girardoni grew up in Vienna, outside a small rural village on the Hungarian border in Austria. In 1982 he emigrated and moved to California. Girardoni went on to study History and Art at Bowdoin College, ME, earning a B.A. in both in 1989. During this time, he also accepted an invitation to be a guest artist at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. The artist lives and works in New York.