Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon - The one-eyed king in the realm of the blind faithless, 2012 (detail)

Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon - The one-eyed king in the realm of the blind faithless, 2012 (detail)

Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon - Ometeotl weeps for Kali in the mescaline dreams of night, 2012 (detail)

Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon - Ometeotl weeps for Kali in the mescaline dreams of night, 2012 (detail)

Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon - Syncretic illusions of a lost crusade, 2014 (detail)

FINN LAFCADIO O’HANLON – HISTORY PUTS A SAINT IN EVERY DREAM

26 May 2014 – 08 June 2014

Opening: 28 May 2014, 6:30 – 9:30 PM with an introduction by Jonathan Meese

The young Australian artist, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon, will present his first-ever European exhibition at Whiteconcepts gallery in Berlin. The exhibition, titled History Puts A Saint in Every Dream, will feature his intricately drawn works in ink on paper.

Although the title is drawn from a lyric by Tom Waits, there is an immediate sense of the weird and medieval in these drawings. References to tattoo and ‘lowbrow’ outsider art, as well as the intricate sci-fi/fantasy of French bandes dessinées are apparent but they are incidental to a visual structure clearly derived from early Renaissance religious art, notably ecclesiastical stained glass windows. These are works that are best read as ‘psychogeographic maps’, tracing the passage of an individual psyche through a series of alternative realities that are often in conflict. Densely drawn, determinedly monochromatic and richly textured, with obscure, syncretic mythological and pop cultural references, negative space is eschewed with almost obsessive determination in order to amplify a dystopian claustrophobia.

In some ways, Finn’s work recalls the cartography of Grayson Perry, notably Perry’s Map Of Nowhere (2008) and Map Of An Englishman (2004), in which layers of symbolism and narrative weave the surreal (and spiritual) with the intimately personal, social and political. The viewer is left to interpret this complex territory on their own terms (as Alfred Korzybski reminds us, the map is not the territory). But under Finn’s hands, the territory is emphatically a re-connection of traditional forms and techniques ­with contemporary qualms and urban iconography. It manages to be, at once, emphatically of this time –uneasy, post-technological – and hauntingly ancient. It is certainly work that in its intellectual depth and technique belies the artist’s young age.

Born in Brighton, England just 22 years ago, to an Australian father and an Hawaiian-Cherokee mother, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon grew up among creative, nomadic types in the UK, then Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, before returning as a teenager to Sydney’s northern beaches. He is a grandson of the late best-selling novelist, Morris West.

Finn’s formal art training ended in high school when his teacher took exception to his various forays into conceptual art – including a specimen bottle filled with his own urine housed in an engraved perspex box – and threw him out of her class.  He taught himself photography instead, and his snapshots of the hard partying and self-negating lifestyles of the surfers and skaters who were his peers gained the attention of the highly regarded French photography and visual arts journal, Plateform, which profiled Finn along with more than 20 of his images. The photographs were also exhibited in a one-man show at the Wedge Gallery, at Kinokuniya Bookstore, as part of Sydney’s Head On Photography Festival.

Moving to France in 2012, Finn was immediately intrigued by the medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass he came across in regional museums and churches. He began drawing on childhood memories of Mexican day of the dead rituals, Native American iconography, and French graphic novels to create his first series of drawings which were shown in a winter group exhibition at Mick Gallery, in Sydney. Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon is now resident in Berlin.

Artist information and work overview

Interview with Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon

Seet van Hout - Brainflower (Detail)

Seet van Hout - Blumenzucht (Detail)

Seet van Hout - Flower (Detail)

Seet van Hout - Fluor (Detail)

Seet van Hout - Weisswurz (detail)

SEET VAN HOUT – RED GREENHOUSE 

June 10 – 30, 2014

Opening: 13 June 2014, 7 PM, in presence of the artist

„The miracle is never perfect when it happens. Only the memory makes it so.“
Erich Maria Remarque

The Gallery WHITECONCEPTS is pleased to present the first exhibition in Berlin of Dutch artist Seet van Hout. The exhibition is comprised of about 20 works, which represents a selection of her artistic spectrum, consisting of paintings, drawings, textile works, objet d’art and ceramics.

The central theme in the work of the renowned artist is the memory which forms a spiritual identity, a thinking being. On one hand, her field of study expands from fragments that appear in front of the inner eye, on the other, the complex identity of a person is created throughout their life and their manner, through dealing with things in the world, then influences their choices in the present.

Van Hout’s experimental approach reflects the vivid, interdependency and serendipity of the world throughout abstract art, with informal and surreal elements toward allegorical depiction. She combines these elements, differentiates, complements, arranges, forms, feels, senses and so allows space for coincidences to affect her work. Art serves her as a transforming and transcendent medium on different levels of consciousness.
Large-scale installations, two-dimensional works and ceramics present an holistic approach, which connect together philosophy, science and religion with experiences and her portraits of the mystics, of modern research and everyday life.

The title of the exhibition “Red Greenhouse” refers to her love for color and nature. Her floral motifs sustain a symbol of growth and mortality, a process to which all living beings in their journeys of self-discovery are subjugated. At WHITECONCEPTS gallery Seet van Hout exhibits precise “needle work”, which comes from a contemplative dialogue between graphics and on-the-line oriented impulses, as well as object-like filament structures that connect to three-dimensional space. In other artistic processes she interweaves chemical color experiments with neuroscience and spiritual ideas. In the spirit of the ultimate goal of alchemy, her work inspires and transcends the being toward the perfection and purification of the soul. Accordingly, the artist accepts the three goddesses of fate and destiny. They hold the threads of peoples’ lives in their hands: the first spins the thread, the second measures it and the third cuts it off.

Seet van Hout’s work has been shown worldwide in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums, including the Bibliotheca Alexandria / Egypt, Xi’An Academy Museum, Xi’an / China, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam / The Netherlands. 
Her work is represented in important private and public collections such as ABN AMRO Collection, The Hague, Gelderland Art Collection, the museum collection of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the Sanders collection or the collection of the Stedelijk Museum.

In 2011 a catalog titled “Red Greenhouse” was published including essays by Prof. Mieke Bal, PhD Martin Gesing, Suzanna Heman, Martin Rehkopp and Wouter Weijers.

Information about Seet van Hout

Mark Nelson - Le Bateau Lavoir Paris

Mark Nelson - Carousel and Eiffel Tower Paris

Mark Nelson - From a Motel window New Jersey

Mark Nelson – This being: That becomes

05 May 2014 – 25 May 2014

The works of British photo artist, Mark Nelson, reflect magical moments of clarity and completeness. As he describes his state of mind while photographing: “These images come from a place inside…”.

The created imagery is like frames from an imaginary movie with a sense to something, which is about to happen, or has just happened. Like photographs of a wanderer across the favourite cities of the world they show sceneries of various places such as Venice, Paris, Berlin, Brighton as well as New York, New Jersey and San Gimignano.

Being a Buddhist, Nelson links the perspective to the idea of true self, a rich well of natural creativity and vibrancy. In Nelson’s show, This being: That becomes, the thread of similarities of his images over a long period of time seems to point toward a common source, of ‘water drawn from the same well’. In addition to his presented works from the last 30 years sound textures, meant to be a soundtrack to the show, will be an obvious catalyst for visitors as it was for the artist, helping to recreate the dreamlike landscape of the inner self.

Impressed by Abstract Expressionist movement in art, invented in the late 1940s in New York, Mark Nelson has been drawn toward shapes and signs. Revealed as a reaction against the horrors of the Second World War, the process of making art was considered to be more important than the final object. In the photographs of Nelson you often find triangles and arrows pointing to other parts of the image, in a sense of leading us to another place, to a point of reference in the image. Whether his black and white or his colour works his imagery has certain painterly qualities, showing a moment in an eternal buzz of change.

Mark Nelson began his photographic career in London in 1980, as a professional printer to some of the UK’s top photographers. His professional darkroom became ‘First Light Studios’ which is now based in Brighton UK. From 1985, after observing the potential of the photographic printing medium as an art form, he began to discover his own ability to create photographic works in his own style, and continues to do so. He has exhibited worldwide and his works are held in many private collections in the UK, France and the USA. He has worked for ECM records, American Express and was the first photographer to have exhibitions on 300 British Airways aeroplanes simultaneously.

With kind support by Nielsen Bainbridge Group. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, 60 pages, 2014.

More information about Mark Nelson

Greg Murr - GRAVITATIONAL LENS [STUDY NO. 21], 2014

Deenesh Ghyczy - Gwen, 2012

DEENESH GHYCZY and GREG MURR – SPECTRAL

01 April 2014 – 15 April 2014

Opening: 04 April 2014, 7 – 9 PM

WHITECONCEPTS presents an exhibition of paintings about our reliance on vision as a means of understanding ourselves and our environment. Spectral, a two-person exhibition of paintings features the works of Deenesh Ghyczy (HU-GER) and Greg Murr (USA). In this show, both artists employ visual aberrations that address the limits of our perceptual capacities and draw connections between everyday phenomena and the unobservable frameworks that govern reality.

Sight is for most the dominant faculty among our five senses. Without vision, navigating quotidian life would require a notably altered approach.Yet for all our reliance upon it, our eyes are nevertheless a finite tool that manufactures a very particular experience of reality via a spectrum of light waves. What happens, then, when we probe vision’s boundaries to explore the distortions and threshold of this perceptual apparatus? And how can we engage our awareness of optical mechanics to explore comparatively intangible contexts such as the interior wonders of the human psyche or, outwardly, the physical laws of nature?

Deenesh Ghyczy uses traditional media to make paintings that would at first glance seem rooted in contemporary technology, given their multi-faceted and sometimes surreal appearance. Figurative subjects, attentively rendered in oil on linen, are fractured into multiple fragments that induce a sense of double- or triple-vision. What some might suspect a digitally based device is actually the diffraction of his subject through a simple prism. At once familiar, disorienting, and at moments haunting, Ghyczy’s rather conventional portraits are turned on their head, as it were, so that we can once more see the components that comprise a face without ever concisely establishing one’s identity. Like hearing a foreign language we can only hope to understand through its phonetic attributes, we’re challenged to look at Ghyczy’s images through the eyes of a child that studies the elements of line, shape, value and hue for the first time, not quite making sense of the whole.

The absence of the whole may initially be the most evident thread of continuity bridging these two artists. Through intentionally disarming studies of one particular peony blossom as viewed from multiple perspectives, Greg Murr similarly probes notions of incompleteness versus manifestation. Vacant holes of canvas replace portions of an otherwise highly rendered floral bloom. White spaces act as place-markers for something once present—now a specter of what had been. And the blossom itself, reiterated in four or five adjacent variations, makes a discrete reference to the cosmological phenomenon of gravitational lensing, (largely attributed to Einstein and his general theory of relativity), where the light of a distant galaxy is distorted and multiplied by the ‘lens’ of intense gravitational forces that stand between it and the observer. Whether with regard to the geometry of the universe, however, or the more earthly notion of the biological life-cycle itself, these meticulously painted perennials captivate with their intrinsic structure, rhythm and animus. Both artists encourage us to reflect upon the act of seeing, indulging us with visual harmony and a taste of the familiar, without fulfilling our expectations or offering full resolution.

Information about Deenesh Ghyczy
www.dghyczy.com

Information about Greg Murr
www.gregmurr.com