PAINTER / SCULPTOR

This exhibition brings together work by nine eminent artists who mastered both painting and sculpture to formulate a unique artistic language. Presenting paintings and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, Dana Schutz, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl, George Condo, KAWS and Jeff Koons, the exhibition highlights some of the key moments of post-war and contemporary art. With their uncommon command of each medium, the artists here present distinct strategies of engaging with the notions of physical space and pictorial depth, surface and substance, using one practice to inform the other.

A painter conjures an illusion of space on the canvas, which nonetheless remains physically impenetrable; sculptor’s work, on the other hand, enters the world of the viewer with the palpable immediacy of bodily presence. As the art historian Anne M. Wagner writes, “sculpture devises ways of making the human image tangibly present in space as body and thing. […] Sculpture, we might say, impacts space the way a musical instrument reshapes the sounding air with every note.”[1] Synthesising and alternating between these dimensions, the painter and sculptor evolves an intense sensibility of the physical impact of their work on the viewer, and on the environment in which it is situated. As Dana Schutz explained in a recent interview: “I was thinking about [the materiality of painting] recently, especially with [regards to] sculpture. I think what is more important is how it exists in a physical space, when you’re standing in front of it. Of course, paintings are physical objects, but images really have no body, no size. I want my subjects and paintings to feel like they have a space in front of the picture plane, that’s a specific physical interaction with the viewer.”[2]

From Giacometti’s preoccupation with situating the figure in space, to the tactility of de Kooning’s painterly and sculptural surface, to the expressive energy of Baselitz’s paintings from the 1980s and 90s, the works included in Painter / Sculptor exemplify this distinct awareness of the space defined by an artwork.

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