Sven-Ole FRAHM, Jeremy THOMAS -

Press release

Galerie Richard, New York, presents Sven-Ole Frahm and Jeremy Thomas from May 25 to June 24, 2018. This is their first show together.

Frahm began his career by pouring paint on a canvas on the floor, cutting it in geometrical shapes and sewing them together. He continues to develop geometrical compositions mixed with three-dimensional interventions on the canvas. In these newest works, he makes rounded or oval holes in the canvases. In this exhibition the viewer can enjoy a painting with one wall and different variations up to a painting including a large amount of small holes dispersed in the canvas. These holes can let the wall appear or reveal another painted canvas underneath. The wall can get colored reflections from the paint on the back of the canvas.

The painting titled #218Glamping Deluxegathers three processes from three different periods of his works: the sewing process with a view of the reversed side of geometrical lines with the two linen, two wood panels which look like inside the canvas such as implants, and circled holes on the canvas with colored reflections. In the painting titled Debaser, two rounded holes in the canvas are filled with a grid of horizontal and vertical white strips of canvas. His aesthetics varies from #209, a suprematist or minimalist rounded hole inside a rounded sewed shape on a rectangle canvas to the colorful exuberant Soda Popwith holes into holes through two canvases, the first natural linen canvas magnifying the second canvas underneath painted with colorful vertical stripes. The dominant color in this exhibition is pink with subtle shades. These thirteen paintings are all different with a specific focus for each of them.

Sven-Ole Frahm continues to surprise and challenge the limitations of the painting and its canvas. There is always a sense of playfulness in his creations as well as a sense of perfect balance in the compositions and arrangement of colors. He invites the viewer to enlarge the field of investigation of paint on canvas as well as the post-modernist revisit of Art History, in particular in Central Europe in the XX century.

Sven-Ole Frahm (b.1972) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.  He graduated from the Art Academy in Dusseldorf in 2001. Frahm has won the prestigious Villa Romana Prize in Firenze in 2003, the ‘Bergischer Kunstpreis’ for painting at Solingen Art Museum in 2006. His work is in the Collection of Société Générale, Paris. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Europe including Paris, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne, London, Amsterdam.

Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1973 Jeremy Thomas lives in Espanola in New Mexico. As he explains: “to me, working in material, it’s a back-and-forth between the artist says this, the material says that”. By injecting air into malleable steel that’s heated to about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, he creates and develops a complete new vocabulary of spontaneous, organic, and sensual shapes.

“Steel”, Thomas says, “is quite malleable and actually a lot like clay (though admittedly it only exhibits those characteristics at upwards of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit)”. After welding flat steel plates together and then subsequently heating them, Jeremy Thomas injects them with pressurized air, inflating, or “growing” them into their final shape. Finally, he paints them with metallic car paint. In the case of some of the smallest pieces, he used nail lacquer for the first time, which expanded his range of colors. The largest sculptures are inflated without the heating process by adding air pressure into cold forms progressively. He can also ingeniously reverse the process and deflate them using a special technique involving extreme cold. Occasionally, his sculptures can explode during the process; Thomas is a risk taker playing with the limits of the material’s resistance. Some of his new sculptures are part inflated and part deflated.

Jeremy Thomas visually, technically, and conceptually unifies dualities, paradoxes and oxymorons:  steel carefully molded by air, a creative process that mixes planned processes and expectations of the general shapes with the unpredictability of results in the details and parts of the sculptures. The sensual three-dimensional shapes come from strict geometrical assembled flat panels, a play between natural, rusted surfaces of the sculptures and their glossy, painted counterparts. Jeremy Thomas is also a great colorist. Every color is unique and very meticulously selected to combine with each unique form and with the color of the rusty surface. The vision of each sculpture changes so drastically from one angle to another, that it is a true experience of discovery just by walking around each one.

Jeremy Thomas will have a solo exhibition at Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM, in 2019. His works are in the Albright–Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, AZ, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM, the Kunstsammlung F. Hoffman-La Roche AG, Basel, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Malibu, CA, Fidelity Investments of Albuquerque, NM.