Hartmut Austen
Blurred Vision is just one of the Symptoms
October 24 – November 18, 2018
Good Weather at Atlanta Contemporary
Atlanta Contemporary
535 Means St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30318.
In Blurred Vision is just one of the Symptoms, Hartmut Austen enlarges an elemental part of the stretcher bar—the canvas key—to create a structural module that, through permutations, becomes a display system for the artists’ paintings from the past two years. The paintings— illusionistic views into a precarious world—engender a distorted position, a blurred view, and a fractured reality in which order is undermined. Dissonant imagery of con-structural elements (beams, towers, shadows, absence, peaking light) give form to personal fears, observations, and fragmentation that echos and counteracts the built environment (a zig-zag of leaning walls) and further exposes fissures in the induced surrealist paralysis.
Hartmut Austen (b. 1967 Lüdenscheid, Germany) studied painting and drawing with H.J. Diehl at Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. His first arrival in the United States was marked by a 1998 group exhibition titled VOID at Unfinished gallery in Williamsburg, New York. He has since exhibited widely in the United States and Germany, most recently at Good Weather (North Little Rock), Waiting Room (Minneapolis), The Bedfellow’s Club (Chicago), and Butchers Daughter Gallery (Detroit). Upcoming shows include Künstliche und Künstlerische Intelligenz at Haus zur Glocke (Steckborn, Switzerland) and Aus Analogen Archiven at OnArte (Minusio, Switzerland). A survey of his work from the past decade is currently on view at McMullen Museum of Art (Boston). In 2009, Austen was awarded a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and was the Grant Wood Fellow for Painting and Drawing at the University or Iowa in 2012/13. He is an Assistant Professor in Painting at Boston College.
Good Weather is pleased to participate in Atlanta Contemporary’s On-Site program. In a nod to this repeated invitation, the gallery will present two solo exhibitions as a hyphenated compound, working through multiple ruminations on painting, beginning with Hartmut Austen’s Blurred Vision is just one of the Symptoms opening on Wed, Oct 24, 2018 (with a public reception on Thu, Oct 25, 2018) and running through Nov 18, 2018, and continuing with Ron Ewert’s I’m getting too old for this shirt opening on Tue, Nov 20, 2018 (with a public reception on Thu, Nov 29, 2018) and running through Dec 15, 2018.
*Images courtesy of the artists and Good Weather