This duo exhibition functions as an intense dialogue between the works of two artists who are generational contemporaries: Sophie von Hellermann (°1975 Munich, lives and works in London) and Josh Smith (°1976 Tennessee, lives and works in New York).
Sophie van Hellermann makes both large and smaller compositions through which she develops fairytale-like and imaginative visual imagery. Every composition becomes a dynamic spectacle of motifs, lines, and colours, in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between the personal narrative and the collective past, and between abstraction and figuration are fully dissolved.
Josh Smith belongs to a painting tradition that seemed extinct, but which he manages to transform into a free repertory of forms. The work, with its explicit references to the history of painting, its ‘expressive’ style, its use of the signature and the absence of subject matter, could perhaps be considered non-contemporary.
