Niels Sievers – Illusion

2. Juni – 7. Juli 2018/June 2 – July 7, 2018
Vernissage: Freitag, 1. Juni 2018, 19-21 Uhr/Opening: Friday, June 1, 2018, 7-9pm

Niels Sievers, Time Travel VI (Detail), 2018
Öl, Sprühlack auf Leinwand/oil, spray paint on jute, 70 x 53 cm

In his third solo exhibition in our gallery we show current works by Niels Sievers, which were made after serious disruption to his art production in the year 2016. A flood which destroyed much of his oeuvre and made his studio unusable, forced him to rethink his position as a painter.

With consistency and newly achieved freedom, Sievers explored his painting techniques and the classical genre of painting and further perfected his experimental approach using a combination of oil, egg tempera and graffiti spray paint. A highlight in the truest sense of the word is the magical light that he creates with it. The pictures shine out of themselves and, depending on the observer’s point of view, the brightness and intensity of the composition change. Striking in this new series of paintings are the increasing colourfulness which replaces his dark night pictures, the meticulously attuned shades, special primers, the use of jute as a base which provides for more organic structures, the scratching out of certain elements and the tension between silvery-shiny and crusty looking colour parts.

The artist dissolves concrete landscape elements more and more into abstraction and at the same time blurs the boundaries between illusion and reality. The image titles in the series “Time travel” indicate that the artist has consciously embarked on a journey into other worlds and time zones. The result is an independent artistic cosmos, which requires a less and less concrete location in reality. The viewers are also invited to enter this intermediate world, which releases them from romance into an inner space: “Tell me where, I`ll meet you there”, is another picture title.

1979 born in Niebüll, Germany; 2002-2008 he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Klasse Jörg Immendorff; 2008 Meisterschüler with Immendorff; 2013 Audience award Kunstmuseum Solingen; 2009 Erwine Steinblum scholarhip, Johannesburg; 2008 Travel grant NRW, Kunstverein Düsseldorf; lives and works in Berlin.

In his third solo exhibition in our gallery we show current works by Niels Sievers, which were made after serious disruption to his art production in the year 2016. A flood which destroyed much of his oeuvre and made his studio unusable, forced him to rethink his position as a painter.

With consistency and newly achieved freedom, Sievers explored his painting techniques and the classical genre of painting and further perfected his experimental approach using a combination of oil, egg tempera and graffiti spray paint. A highlight in the truest sense of the word is the magical light that he creates with it. The pictures shine out of themselves and, depending on the observer’s point of view, the brightness and intensity of the composition change. Striking in this new series of paintings are the increasing colourfulness which replaces his dark night pictures, the meticulously attuned shades, special primers, the use of jute as a base which provides for more organic structures, the scratching out of certain elements and the tension between silvery-shiny and crusty looking colour parts.

The artist dissolves concrete landscape elements more and more into abstraction and at the same time blurs the boundaries between illusion and reality. The image titles in the series “Time travel” indicate that the artist has consciously embarked on a journey into other worlds and time zones. The result is an independent artistic cosmos, which requires a less and less concrete location in reality. The viewers are also invited to enter this intermediate world, which releases them from romance into an inner space: “Tell me where, I`ll meet you there”, is another picture title.

1979 born in Niebüll, Germany; 2002-2008 he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Klasse Jörg Immendorff; 2008 Meisterschüler with Immendorff; 2013 Audience award Kunstmuseum Solingen; 2009 Erwine Steinblum scholarhip, Johannesburg; 2008 Travel grant NRW, Kunstverein Düsseldorf; lives and works in Berlin.

PresseEcho

Der Tagesspiegel, Mehr Berlin, Niels Sievers