Press Release

Heads and tails appear and disappear throughout the illusionistic space of Anne Neukamp‘s paintings. Pile ou Face, the background becomes the foreground, the signifier escapes the signified, shadows drop before our eyes. In her pictorial approach to semantics, Anne Neukamp composes with the idiomatic motifs, logos, pictograms, and mascots that populate our informational subconscious. Deceptively, she juxtaposes layers, merges them, and makes them transparent or opaque. Permeated by the materiality of painting and stripped of their functionality, signs and images designed for everyday efficiency take on sculptural proportions.

The piles of coins and tokens in her recent series of large-scale paintings appear tangible yet they remain out of reach—money without wealth, currencies without nations, accounts without passwords. In these numismatic abstractions, which occasionally morph to resemble half-eaten biscuits, Neukamp summons the liquidity of money to construct shape-shifting edifices. Similarly, in a series of works on paper, the grid-structure of a calendar becomes the site of painterly occurrences that suggest the scattered rhythm of daily life punctuated by bills and shopping lists.

By layering oil, acrylic, and tempera, the artist plays with the spatial properties of her materials. In her paintings, gestures and renderings are as entangled as the fragments of reality they depict, conceal or surround. Guided by a pictorial logic of montage, Neukamp’s repertoire extends beyond the realm of painting; it encompasses graphic design, typography and the technical image in its various forms. Her paintings exist in-between screen space and physical space; they blur the boundary between software and hardware.

Anne Neukamp (b. 1976, Düsseldorf), lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Pitching Pennies, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf, DE (2020); Alt-Moa-Bit, Gregor Podnar, Berlin, DE (2019); The Prop Master, Rosenwald-Wolf-Gallery, University of the Arts Philadelphia, US (2018); Gamberge, Galerie Valentin, Paris, FR (2018). Pile ou Face is Anne Neukamp’s third solo exhibition at Galerie Greta Meert

Courtesy Galerie Greta Meert

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About the Artist

Anne Neukamp (b. 1976, Düsseldrof, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. The motifs and elements she uses in her work derive from our everyday decor, the image archive of the consumer society: cartoon characters and mascots, heraldic details, letters from the newspaper, and advertising pictograms. She allows these functional signs and images, designed for efficiency, to become fragments beneath layers of paint or even to disappear entirely; she puts them together in new and different ways, stripping them of their univalent impact. Her works move within a logic of shifting and undermining and stimulate the most diverse interpretations. At the same time, through their occasionally cheeky imagery, they appear to flirt with the expectations of the market.

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About the Gallery

Over the past 30 years, Galerie Greta Meert established itself as one of Brussels’ leading contemporary art galleries. Founded in 1988 as Galerie Meert Rihoux, it was subsequently renamed after its founding director Greta Meert in 2006. Located in the center of Brussels, the gallery occupies a five-story Art Nouveau building designed by Louis Bral and renovated for the gallery by renowned Belgian architects Hilde Daem and Paul Robbrecht. Since 2012 three floors of the building are dedicated to exhibitions, making it possible to maintain an expanded exhibition schedule.

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13 Rue du Canal
Brussels
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Tues - Sat, 2pm - 6pm
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Brussels 13 Rue du Canal
Galerie Greta Meert
13 Rue du Canal, Brussels, Belgium

Opening hours
Tues - Sat, 2pm - 6pm
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