Sven-Ole FRAHM - fast richtig = voll verkehrt

Press release

Gallery Jean-Luc & Takako Richard presents for the first time a one-man show of Sven-Ole Frahm in France from 22nd November to 10th January 2009. The exhibition title « fast richtig = voll verkhert » meaning « almost right = completely false » defines well the artist’s sense of perfection. Sven-Ole Frahm creates a scale model of the gallery and prepares in advance some miniatures of his artworks to think about how to hang them.  At the same time, Sven-Ole Frahm invites Lorenzo Pompa in order to share half of the exibition space with him. Both artists will suggest a dialogue between painting and sculpture following a specific itinerary orcchestrated by a disposition of horizontal and vertical sculptures and by the rhythm of the different canvas sizes.

Sven-Ole Frahm was born in 1972, he currently lives and works in Berlin. He is one of the emerging new abstractionists in Germany. This new form of abstraction does not originate in the elevation to transcendance and sublimation, but in an inspiration from the pictoral practice of abstract painting. He creates a harmony between two unlikely aesthetics which the artists do not generally confront : a fluid one, composed by curves, which follows an order of unprompted appearance as in the nature, and a geometrical one, with horizontal, vertical and diagonal straight line, which refers to an organised minded logic.

Sven-Ole Frahm usually pours acrylic paint on a canvas that is laid on the ground. It spreads according to the uneven surface of the ground and it is manipulated by the artist who guides the flow of the expanding stain. The result of a two-colored painting could stand on its own as an artwork. In his new works, he adds a control gestural calligraphy, which enriches his palette of colors and transforms his paintings into polychrome symphonies. The fluidity of the shapes and the interplay of colors and empty spaces are satisfying on its own. Sven-Ole Frahm destroys the first canvas in order to add the second aesthetics. He cuts it up into geometrical sections, either into squares and rectangles or diamond-shaped forms. As if it was a puzzle of which he had already imagined the final image, he sows the pieces together in a new arrangement. This way he adds a geometrical structure to the swaying colors that collide with the borders of each fraction of the painting. We are in front of a destruction-creation process that the great economist Joseph Schumpeter stands up for. Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard with Sven-Ole Frahm, Marcus Sendlinger and Christoph Wedding, brings together these young German artists who have returned to some fundamental patterns of abstract painting in order to reinvent it.

Sven-Ole Frahm took part in the exhibition Compilation III at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf in 2007 and was awarded the 60th Bergischer Prize for Art in 2006 at Soligen Art Museum. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris.