Zürich | ArtRegion: Zürich

Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Alex Hubbard: Bent paintings

(Why horses paint)

2. November 2012 – 19. Januar 2013

With this exhibition, Galerie Eva Presenhuber is returning to the Löwenbräu area, establishing a second gallery location beside the Diagonal Building premises.

In his first solo show at the gallery, the New York based artist presents his “Bent Paintings” and a video work. The sculptural character of the nine “Bent Paintings” breaks with conventions of classical painting, the geometrical two- dimensionality of traditional picture formats giving way to bent structures, some of them free-standing sculptures totally emancipated from the wall. As a continuation of his “Trash Paintings,” to which plastic objects are attached in the style of a material assemblage, both the support and the applied plastic objects are subsequently cast in urethane. While this collage of different trashy objects resembles a staged presentation of the flotsam and jetsam of civilization, they also seem to be dancing, arranged in a secret choreography, the movement of its individual items frozen. All “Bent Paintings” are based on the same painting, which is nine times molded and cast.

The process of making the “Bent Paintings”, on the other hand, is characterized by a dynamism that recalls the table-top performances in Hubbard’s videos, where everyday objects are playfully staged and then gleefully demolished in unexpected ways in the spirit of an aesthetic of the performative – videos whose specific quality might be described as “moving painting”.