Maksla XO Gallery - PREVIEW BERLIN 2013

Stand - No. 40

Opernwerkstatten Berlin, Zinnowitzer Strasse 9                              http://www.opernwerkstaetten.de/.

Kristaps Gelzis "Without Words" 2013
 polythene, plastic adhesive, acrylic pigments, inkjet printing on transparent film, 175x200

At this year Preview Berlin 2013, „Maksla XO” gallery presents recent works of Kristaps Gelzis, Michel Castaignet and Tatjana Krivenkova.
All three artists are interested primary in art content, which they descry in the reflection of reality and actuality, but each of them fulfill it in their own particular way. Kristaps Gelzis and Michel Castaignet are interested in portraying society through the game; that is why such opposties as joke and seriousness, directness and delicate poetics, irony and sentiment can be seen simultaneously in their works. Tatjana Krivenkova, in her turn, focusing on the reflection of light, transforms physical touch to the canvas into spiritual energy.

Kristaps Gelzis (1962, Riga) – for Preview Berlin visitors Kristaps Gelzis is already known artist, who is presenting himself in various contemporary artistic mediums – large scale drawings, watercolours, fluorescent paintings, 3-dimensional objects, digital prints and recent plastic paintings from polythene, scotch and colour markers.
Kristaps Gelzis works are inspired by daily observations, inconspicuous weekday events, which become his art’s way out (point of exit) and result in the same time. Now he is searching for facture of nowadays. Facture that testify the time, hence also form of expression resembles this period. Everything is spoiled – everything is plastic, chemicals, garbage mountains. However, he likes the beauty of this terrible material.

Michel Castaignet (1971, Paris) – his artist career Michel Castaignet started exhibiting video and computer art in the underground scene of London.  This activity drove his interest to art theory and he graduated Master of Arts, Aesthetics and Art Theory, Middlesex University in London in 2000.
For many years Michel Castaignet is reflecting on painting as a medium and concerned with Clement Greenberg theories of the interplay between painting and its time. For that reason Castaignet loves french minimalsts from the 1960s – Claude Rutault and the BMPT group – Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni. Michel Castaignet’s painting is made of graphical and temporal disruptions, where like a formal method he adapts freely the system of strips and the principle of repetition of the BMPT group to a landscape. Michel Castaignet tries to translate these researches, transforming formal critiques into social critiques. 

Tatjana Krivenkova (1964, Riga) – is a well known painter with a cultivated and extremely fine sense of colouring. Her recent paintings represent the purest expressions of absctraction. Like Peter Hoeg describes Smilla's Sense of Snow, Tatjana Krivenkova paints various light reflections – play of light on different surfaces, light divagation from darkness and pollution of light. The large-scale glazed and matted canvases are almost monochromatic, with only tiny brush strokes creating fine nuances in tone. She attempts to paint endless space, which has nothing to do with the flat surface of a painting and is something more than tones and forms for some decorative purposes. “I wanted to paint in such a way that the viewer does not sense matter, so as not to sense the painting itself, so that there would be a window, an illusion” – Tatjana Krivenkova.

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