Hartmut Austen
Here r more
May 13–Jun 25, 2016
4400 Edgemere
North Little Rock,
AR 72116
What is love without regret.
Tom Friel (2016)
Faced to this set, paintings swung wide open, proceeding through the nave: Here r more. The view: a visually stacked image-scape, shifting frames of reference, interruptions, and a de-emphasis of the thematic footing of an exhibition, aside a rather intrepid acceptance of the mysterious, emotionally charged, and phenomenological process of painting. Slowing down. Turning around. Looking through this intermingling of pictorial space and real space, the surfaces of these stretched canvases become panes of glass: at one point reflexive, another reflective, and at another point a space through which one can see. This view, this mirror, this window, this row of kicked-out thresholds lining the aisles, is fluctuating with every flicker of light, with every brush stroke, each moment an accumulation of the last. Swiping rapidly through, flipping each page, the artist is wandering, longing, lingering, until at last a pause. Hartmut Austen belongs to the precariousness in this unhanding. This gasp. Tetelestai. And this belonging is his awareness of doubt.
This exhibition is supported in part by a University of Minnesota Imagine Fund Faculty Grant.