GET
BACK
Art at the interface between the individual and history - an exhibition
of drawings, paintings and prints of Liverpool artist Pete Clarke
"Get back," Go back, is the motto that applies even if you
have the future in mind. You have to know the history to know what
is happening in the present, so as not to unwittingly stumble into
the future. History is for the born in 1951 in Burnley, Lancashire
Pete Clarke has long been the central artistic subject. In other words,
with the means of painting he leads our experience of those obscure
point in the history of the individual and society meet, interpenetrate
each other or make life difficult at all possible. Elements of collage
break through in his art, the unity of the subject painterly representation.
Fragments determine the images to determine our perception, our experience.
Identity seems to be the biggest difficulty amidst a tugging in all
directions life, in which the people are the stirrings of nature equally
ambivalent as the element of nature. Identity is a cultural performance
and individual performance, and both are inextricably intertwined.
Clarke, who has lived since the late 1970s in Liverpool, is a master
of the representational-figurative representation. His painting stands
in direct continuity to an expressionist painting, the varieties of
realism on the one hand, the opportunities for energetic and free
expression on the other. He is also keen to experiment and playful
enough to attack the objective reality over and over again by abstract-expressive
gestures and accentuate and so on to the brink of their resolution.
Finally, among the inclusion of words and text as an integral part
of his painterly approach. A few words, a few words are enough to
provide the impression of a romantic nature Impression under the dimension
of history and into its opposite. Terms require intellectualism in
art appreciation. It is as if Clarke break the spell of mere intuition
repeatedly targeted because he is not the beauty of art in the complex
(post-) modern society trusts. He wants to tie the colors that make
him away dreaming about the everyday life and ordinary life, coming
back to the sober facts of history and society.
Clarke is not only at the level of a contemporary painting that is
trying to assert itself violently at all artistically expressed fragmentation
of our life experience against this postmodern trend. He is also on
the level of social discourse between the positions of Marshall McLuhan
("the medium is the message"), Jean Baudrillard's sober
analysis of the end of art, history, politics and the social and Richard
Sennett's theories of flexible people. The developments of the past
few decades, let the painting by the great relativization of "anything
goes" to be a whole new challenge. You can not just paint only,
you must also show a break with the history of modernism, the 20th
at the end of Century is done, Clarke (artistic) conviction. At the
same time you have to keep the specific power of painting, as it was
developed in the past by artists such as Turner, Goya, Manet, Monet
and Cezanne. Everything that applies to his paintings and his drawings,
also applies to Clarke's graphic works. Walter Benjamin's reflections
on art in the age of mechanical reproduction and the aura of the artwork
for Clarke are just as important as the (experimental) facility of
the relationship between printmaking and the text dimension of poetry.
In his prints shows that Clarke for the drawing is the basis of all
art. Clarke draws from his youth. His stroke is accomplished with
an insolent ease - rhythmic, energetic, precise, as if he were a natural
continuation of his gaze. Who is working as a professor of painting
at the University of Lancashire artist discovered the medium of printmaking
in recent years once again for themselves. Since then, many works
have emerged which have always been important to him: natural feel
and urban experience, the tension between individual and society,
of history and instantaneous experience.
Kunstraum Twenty Three
Honschaftsstrasse 320, 51061 Cologne, Tel: 021-3565841
26th September to 12 October 2012
Opening: 26.9, 19 clock.
Open: Wed 17-20 clock, Fri 17-19 Clock
