Clegg & Guttmann / Max Dauphin / Torben Giehler / Gilles Pegel / ToiToi / Jean-Philippe Tromme
TRANSFORMTION
Krome Gallery is pleased to present Transformation, featuring a group of six artists working in a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, and installation.
While the artists have very different backgrounds and aesthetic approaches, they share a similar interest in paradigm shifts, the crisis of value in contemporary culture and an investigation into fundamental concepts such as truth and representation.
Clegg & Guttman's photographs have been based on questions of portraiture, the representation of power, and the codification of gestures. Famous for their images representing powerful people or families inspired both by 17th-century Dutch painting and commissioned portraits for annual reports, they developed different typologies of photographs through the 1980s and 1990s.
Max Dauphin, who lived for two years in Senegal, appropriates local aesthetics and questions the effect of globalisation on artistic production and culture. In his work, the symbols and manifestations of ruthless exploitation of natural resources are turned into totems of a hybrid culture.
Similarly, the Belgian artist Jean-Philippe Tromme transforms everyday objects of mass consumption into elegant bronze sculptures. He investigates as much the becoming of a sculptural object as the space in between, the rendering of a specific form as much as the perception of a newly created space.
Gilles Pegel questions the innate and comforting longing for steady and simple schemes and creates objects that don’t abide to these aspirations. Pieces such as perverted chirality (2015) mostly find their impetus in the transcription of scientific theories into the artistic context.
ToiToi is an artist duo working consecutively on the same canvas. In doing so, the two painters set aside the possibility of working towards a preconceived outcome and impose themselves the process of a steady flow of action and reaction. Their approach as ToiToi is a humoristic, even sarcastic one and constitutes a persiflage of the construction of artistic relevance.
In Torben Giehler's work, it seems as if digital technology becomes a natural extension of the paintbrush. Diagonal perspectives and precisely demarcated, almost curvy boxes of colour give one a sense of virtual time travel. Some have the aerial view of an airport landing strip, others of a race car track or are evocative of a transcendental experience of light and sound, an ambient sense of movement and distance found in interactive media.