Saturday, January 21, 2023

Into The Unknown- new paintings exhibition at gallery 60SIX in San Francisco, Feb 11 - March 4. 2023


Into the Unknown
 

Jurgen Trautwein’s exhibition “Into the Unknown" is his ninth show of paintings at 60SIX. Consistent with most of his painting series the artist used found objects as the canvas. Large print fashion ads in a hanging banner format provide a front and back surface for the work. 

Echoing a past suite of works called “Skins”, both sides of the banners have a painted surface. In the series “Skins”, images showed through monochrome paintings and the back was latent but mostly invisible unless turning the piece. In this case the backside becomes the front, which presents controlled accidents made with additive and subtractive processes. Surfaces are built with unpredictable texture, color and composition. Nuances of printmaking, particularly mono printing appear, where the pealed paint from the studio floor merge with paint bleeding through the front. Unexpected images emerge, reminiscent of aerial topography or landscapes. No boundary exists here in what mark came from what circumstance. 

Trautwein violating the surface within a finessed dance of intention, chaos, deliberation and accident, results in a rich, unbridled sensibility to these paintings.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Thursday, February 3, 2022

R u Sirius new paintings on star- and animal game maps at gallery 60six in San Francisco


 

R u Sirius
 

Jürgen Trautwein presents his new suite of paintings in an eighth exhibition with 60SIX, “R u Sirius”. His practice of using found objects continues as in this series printed vellum maps of game animals and star constellations act as the canvas, both showing through and at times creating resistance with the acrylic paint. Jürgen has an uncanny ability to seemingly effortlessly integrate elements of subjects or materials he confronts in daily life into his paintings.

In these paintings the artist’s brush marks subtly or boldly disintegrate and deconstruct. In some pieces the marks from the maps below show through the paint as a curious pattern or code. Trautwein’s deliberate manner allows his color fields and wide brush gestures to interact with the found object substrate and create an unlabored aesthetic, not precious, nor overly worked. The artist says about his paintings, “They are voids of no incident encouraging a state of contemplative meditation in the viewer.”

The name of the series married with the outer space maps suggest the absurdity and inevitably of our precarious current relationship with the larger universe and the microscopic world. This angst resides just beneath the surface in our lives and below the artist’s confident gesture.

Reception:  Saturday, February 19
5:00-8:00pm
at 455A Valencia, SF CA 94103
MASKS required and vaccination cards will be checked at the door.






 

60SIX
After the off-site opening, view by appointment
at 12 Elgin Park
San Francisco CA 94103
http://www.gallery60six.com
415-577-4396



 

Monday, November 22, 2021

Goethe on demand: Bias in technologies - short films 18-28 November 2021



Goethe on Demand: Bias in technologies
Shorts

Language DE, EN
Subtitles EN
Genre Short films
Country Germany, USA
Year 2001 - 2020
Directors Brenda Lien, Veneta Androva, Björn Melhus, Halina Kliem, Jürgen Trautwein, Silvia Nonnenmacher, Vera Sebert, Harun Farocki
Length 84 minutes
FSK  16 Years

In a humorous, playful, experimental, surprising and provocative way, the short films collected here question the use of and our dealings with various forms of technology as well as the effects of deep socio-political structures on algorithms. They provide insights into the machines and present utopian-dystopian views of posthumanist futures.


Brenda Lien’s Call of Comfort (DE 2018, 9 min.) deals with our online privacy, which falls victim to our demand for comfort as well as the promise of an optimized life. AIVA (DE 2020, 13 min.) by Veneta Androva humorously analyzes how “neutral” artificial intelligence can be, deconstructing the myth of the male genius. The experimental science fiction short film by video artist Björn Melhus, SUGAR (DE 2019, 20 min), confronts us with a post-humanist and post-capitalist future in which robots seek a way out of the echo chambers of meaningless selfie monologues left behind by humans. Halina Kliem’s speculative fiction The AIs (DE/USA 2021, 7 min.) is an experimental fiction on learning and unlearning, mind and labor, dynamics of bias, as well as change, and a dialogue between human and non-human entities. The film explores beliefs humans have about themselves, using feedback loops, chaotic systems, and historical-pattern-replicating machines. Meta_Face (USA 2017, 2 min.) by Jürgen Trautwein and Silvia Nonnenmacher reflects on how the major social networks we feed daily with our search queries, status updates, and location services know more about our obsessions and addictions than we do. Vera Seberts and Harun Farocki direct our gaze into the machines: What happens when visual language elements and metatexts are stripped of their context? Liquid Traits of an Image Apparatus (DE/AT, 2019, 7 min.) presents a poetic-experimental choreography of codes and symbols. In numerous juxtapositions, Eye/Machine III (DE, 2003, 25 min.) examines “intelligent” image processing techniques and “operative seeing” as well as the relationship between man, machine and modern warfare: What are the socio-political, but also humanistic consequences when (war) machines block out “surplus” information?   

Some of these films contain graphic scenes of nudity.