Group Show

Michael Coughlan, Gert Rappenecker and Janne Räisänen

Stalke Galleri

Vesterbrogade 14A

29.9 to 11.11 2000

Press Release

Stalke Galleri presents

Michael Coughlan (USA)
Gert Rappenecker (Switzerland)
Janne Räisänen (Finland)

For the past several years, Los Angeles artist Michael Coughlan has exhibited sculptures, drawings, and paintings in the United States and Europe. Michael Coughlan's project at Stalke Galleri will consist of twenty-four to thirty drawings done in pen on paper. Through an economy of line, these works simultaneously combine abstraction, landscape, and figuration in a humorous and often deadpan manner. While humor and a slight sense of irony pervade this body of work, Coughlan uses it in a sincere search for images and formal structures that do not allow recourse to predetermined systems of meaning. The works included in the show range from desert landscapes with apocalyptic and sometimes sexually implicit narratives to abstract forms given figurative personality and a dose of the uncanny. It is through this serendipitous exploration of form and the multiplicity of ensuing images that Coughlan mines humor and attempts to walk a fine line between things absurdly skeptical and profoundly meaningful.

Gert Rappenecker, born 1955 in Freiburg/Breisgau, works with a variety of media and repeatedly creates provocative interfaces between projections full of nostalgic yearning and the cool distance of industrially produced materials.
At Stalke Galleri, Gert Rappenecker will show an installation related to his recent works. Rappenecker's works constantly leave viewers amazed, for they make use of such different media and cannot therefore be readily interpreted in some unequivocal manner. He is interested in transforming "inanimate formalisms" into pictures full of Romantic illusion and in ascertaining what the metaphysical dimension and meaning of the Romantic, the soulful, and the poetic is.

Janne Räisänen, born 1971 in Pudasjärvi, Finland, and lives in Helsinki. Janne Räisänen covers his paintings with a rhythmic flow of figures and formations. At times, the colors have been applied pastose and relief-like, while other parts of the canvas are totally untouched. If his small canvases often depict a detail, the large paintings are filled with a myriad of details and UFO-like figures, which viewers can let their gaze feel its way over, grasp onto, and ponder. In his exhibition at Stalke Galleri, Janne Räisänen will show several new paintings.