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Thomas Huber

Rote Fries (Red Frieze)
05.23.14 - 08.10.14
Exhibition — Espace EDF Bazacle

Thomas Huber's exhibit at the Espace EDF Bazacle. Photo Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Thomas Huber's exhibit at the Espace EDF Bazacle. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Thomas Huber's exhibit at the Espace EDF Bazacle. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Thomas Huber's exhibit at the Espace EDF Bazacle. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Thomas Huber's exhibit at the Espace EDF Bazacle. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Born in 1955 in Zürich (Switzerland), he lives in Berlin. 

 

Noting the affinities between the exhibition rooms at Espace EDF Bazacle and the architectural structures depicted in many of his paintings, Thomas Huber has chosen to underscore this parallel by presenting the thirty works of his Rote Fries (red frieze) series painted in 2013 and 2014. On the two sides of a specially built picture wall running diagonally across the space, the paintings are hung above a broad red band, like the frieze that features in the pictures themselves.
 
When Huber left the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in 1983 a revival of interest in painting was under way. His own work certainly partook of this general trend, but it was the antithesis of the neo-expressionism that was its dominant manifestation. His handling was always neutral, the paint thinly applied. His paintings showed spaces, usually interiors, constructed in accordance with the laws of geometric perspective, in which the human figure was only a fleeting presence. These spare structures evoke the functionalism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, right down to the use of coloured walls to define spaces. The artist humorously presents himself as the conscientious “buttler” of the image, struggling with his endless tasks: “Every day you have to tidy, clean, air!” And yet these paintings also have a strangeness, a metaphysical dimension, something close to the empty cities of Giorgio de Chirico or the artists of German Neue Sachlichkeit. But then these overtones ultimately serve to highlight the fundamentally reflexive dimension of Huber’s painting: in them, he articulates a whole philosophy of art, from production to exhibition. Hence the recurring depictions of spaces that evoke either the studio or the museum. Also dating from his years of study is one of the practices that has distinguished Huber’s art since the “Discourse on the Flood” of 11 February 1982. This is the way he regularly produces – and painstakingly publishes – texts to accompany the exhibition of his works. In this way he develops a singular relation between image and text in which the latter does not explain the former but extends and develops its contents. “The orator aspires to a space, to a place where the ideas he expresses in words can find ideas expressed in images in the unfolding of the discourse.” With regard to Rote Fries, he compares the progress of the gaze in the painting as a journey over the sea – he often uses the element of water as a metaphor for painting – leading the viewer into a different kind of world to be perceived in relation to the stability of the structures represented there.

Thomas Huber's project is supported by the Fondation EDF, the EDF Bazacle Centre, and the Fondation Pro Helvetia.
Thanks to: Galerie Skopia, Geneva.