Press Release - Klemens Gasser

Press Release

Klemens Gasser Needle Paintings

ONE-DAY-EXHIBITION

Thursday, October 12th, 2017. 10AM - 8PM.

Opening 6PM - 8PM.

Slapping

Spanking

Tearing

Beating

Peeling

Scratching

Ripping

Piercing

Building up

Stripping off

Revealing

Each canvas is a body. In Klemens Gasser’s new series of paintings canvas stands in for skin, wooden stretchers for bone. Flesh speaks drum-like as it submits to the impact of the painter’s hands. There is no light touch, no subtle line. Gasser is heavy handed in the most literal way.

The paintings are layered with combinations of oil paint, liquid body latex, urine, solvents, and iodine. They are thrown face down, prostrate in the weeds, stomped upon to remove layers. Paint is scratched away with finger nails. They are pierced with hypodermic needles, torn, and sliced with knives.

Each canvas is submitted to the extremes of the artist’s sadism. What is left are primitive figures, shadow bodies depicting raw nerves. Shaky outlines of the victims’ perception emerge. Pain blossoms in reds and fleshy pinks like euphoric clouds of endorphins across the brain and body. The woven submissive is stretched to the limit, taut and immobile. Gaping slices sag like drooling mouths or jaws in rigid screams. Bloody red holes loom between quivering outlines of limbs.

Gasser’s process is unique to his perspective as an artist and erotic. The result is as beautifully sensual as it is violent. A figurative style emerges with the naiveté of primitive fertility figures. The colors are as translucent and bold as bodily fluids.

Gasser creates stand ins for the body, the psyche, the nervous system overloaded with pure being, pure now, pure experience, anathema to today’s digital, virtual, planned, branded, image-catered lives. He creates a different form of consumption that is experienced only in the body—an anti-mindfulness in reaction to our complicated and stressful world.

--Anouche Wise

Klemens Gasser will show 26 new Needle Paintings:

10 Large canvases: 8' - 2" x 5' - 8"

7 Mid-size canvases: 5' - 10" x 5'

1 Mid-size triptych of each: 2' - 4" x 2', combined triptych 28" x 74"

6 Small canvases:  2' - 4" x 2'

1 Small dark canvas: 2' x 1' - 10"

1 Small dark canvas: 2' - 2" x 2' - 2"

* in collaboration with Tanja Grunert Gallery

bureau gasser 524 w 19th St NYC 10011

646-286-8689 klemens@klemensgasser.com

bureaugasserny.blogspot.com

instagram @klemensgasser