ERIK LINDMAN

Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce Blanks, the third exhibition by American artist Erik Lindman at the gallery- the artist’s second in its Paris space - from March 21 to April 22, 2015. The exhibition will be comprised of entirely new paintings.

“Over the past few years, I have been using found surfaces in my paintings. The found surfaces incorporated an objective correlative into the painting: a pre-made element from which to begin. In the studio, I would edit these surfaces through reshaping and orienting them on the canvas.

It was important to me that the added surfaces not have a physical dimension. I would integrate them into the picture plane through building up paint layers to the level of the found surfaces on the supporting canvas. Through this process, the marks and the shape of the found surface would read visually integrated, not dimensionally separate.

My interest in these elements was always painterly, not in the specificity of the surfaces. Painting over the found surfaces, their shapes and lines became guiding principles. The incidental marks on the surface brought forth in previous works were no longer present. Painting over the surfaces obscured their source and created a highly specific shape that exists only in the painting itself. The obscured surfaces made the resulting work directly engage with a language of painting instead of an appropriation of its vocabulary.

Embracing this language allowed for a freedom to create new paintings from proxies of the found surfaces. In this new body of work, I have traced the found surfaces directly onto paintings, transforming them into drawing elements. I have traced the found surfaces onto sized canvas that I have collaged onto new paintings. I have collaged multiple versions of the same form onto the same canvas. I had previously described the surfaces as anonymous, but now a better word is eidetic.

The new paintings frame spatial excerpts. And in the process of their creation, the paintings veer away from the surface to which they had originally referred. The original shape may just be a suggestion of its final manifestation. In its creation, each painting is at some point lost, dies, becomes new.” - Erik Lindman, 2014

Erik Lindman (b. 1985) received his B.A. from Columbia University in 2007. He has had several solo gallery exhibitions including Open Hands, Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2014), Do not touch doubtful things ribordy contemporary, Geneva (2013), Human Personality, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris (2012) and Studio, ribordy contemporary, Geneva (2012). His work is regularly shown in group exhibitions in Europe and the U.S, among them The Shell: Landscapes, Portraits & Shapes: a show curated by Eric Troncy, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris (2015); Neo Povera, L&M, Los Angeles (2013); Pour une grammaire du hasard, Fri Art, Fribourg (2012); and ‘The Painter of Modern Life (2015) organized by Bob Nickas at Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Lindman lives and works in New York.

Erik Lindman Blanks
21.03 - 22.04.15
Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele