The BANG-BANG Painting Collective

A new exhibition by Andre Hemer
The BANG-BANG Painting Collective

25 February – 21 March 2009

Paint-drop-candy-factory goes wild (Part 2), 2008

Bartley + Company Art
56A Ghuznee Street, Wellington

Andre Hemer’s new exhibition The BANG-BANG Painting Collective is a new body of work “seeking to push, pull, and provoke the possibilities that painting presents”. The term ‘collective’, Hemer says, is used to refer not to a group of artists, but rather to speak to the range of colliding conceptual possibilities that can occur even within a single body of work.

Hemer likes his paintings to contain contradictions. These paintings are visually light-heard but loaded with history; they are abstract yet the paint acts in an almost figurative manner – tumbling, falling, stacked and heaped within the landscape of the linen-covered stretcher; they are hand-painted yet initially drawn on computer.

In using the computer as his starting point for painting, Hemer hopes to both renew and sabotage conventional ways of seeing and thinking about the painting process.
“This is not about making work about technology, but instead using technology as a way of generating a physical process,” he says. “A computer-drawn image is transformed into visceral and physical layers of paint that sit clearly raised from the raw linen surface. The computer software’s failure to do something as simple as recreating a curve without distorted lines is reproduced faithfully by hand- in a triumph of the physical object over digital, and hand over computer.”

Since graduating with a Masters of Fine Arts with distinction from the University of Canterbury in 2006, Andre has been continuously painting in New Zealand and overseas. After finishing his degree he went to London to a Royal College of Art Postgraduate Painting Residency and last year he spent time in Korea on an artist residency run by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. Most of the works in this exhibition were painted during that residency.

ENDS

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