Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen   Untitled   2011

“We have to approach Oehlen's works gradually, step by step, as though ascending a staircase. We set out armed with the confidence of certainty, full of an unerring faith in the power of irony, streetwise to all the tricks of ridicule, only to find ourselves confronted with unreal forms and meaningless signs of glaring duplicity. Their sole objective seems to be to keep us alert and constantly on the lookout so that the whole painting can reveal itself for what it really is. The paintings have an information overload reminding the spectator that looking at the picture is likely to put him in the precarious position of having his eyes opened.”                                              
                                                                         Fabrice Hergott

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke   Untitled   2006

“Darkness and light inextricably coexist, as social bonding coexists with aggression against the other. Everything is on its way to becoming something else. Everything we see is likely to be something other than what we think it is, or on its way to being seen as something other. We ourselves are always flowing out of ourselves, into the ozone of transcendence, into the cauldron of desire or the collective mystery of society. This whole exhibition, in fact, might be considered a succinct catalogue of the ways we get it wrong --an atlas of roads-to-hell well paved with good intentions -- an index of quick fictions that demonstrate the frailty of our aspirations to integrity and understanding. The gift these paintings make to us, then, is the vertiginous, anxious pleasure we derive from being freely lost, from not seeing anything clearly and not knowing anything for sure. In Polke's aesthetic, these anxious pleasures are the best we can expect from a world in which one pays too high a price for the comfort of certainty.”

                            Dave Hickey   from the catalogue Sigmar Polke: History of Everything

Nuala Gregory

Nuala Gregory   detail from Exploded View wall installation   2010

“Post-medium and post-conceptual theories of art suggest that painting is not so much dead as posthumous, enduring an unending afterlife. Its achievement is certain but insufficiently understood, and so it lingers on (as embarrassment, enigma, or happy commodity) in the digital age.”

  Nuala Gregory