Electra - by STiNK!, 2011, acrylic on canvas tryptich, 100 x 210 cm, from the exhibition alone together at Two Window Project. 26 March - 23 April 2011.

Presented in as a tryptich of canvases, echoing the format of religious works, STiNK! mixes it up with references and imagery borrowed from classics including da Vinci, de Chirico and Buckminster Fuller. This layered and combined with insertions of texts such as "Love is a hard drive named Electra", "and then she crashed on me" to create a complex and polished 21st century scenario for this work.

Paintings by Ingrid Simons for Alone Together

top: Chegando A Casa, 2010, oil on linen, 40 x 30 cm
second: Le Foret Noir IV, 2010, oil on linen, 60 x 50 cm
third: Le Foret Noir II, 2010, oil on linen, 80 x 80 cm
lower: Finsternis I, 2010, oil on linen, 50 x 60 cm

For this exhibition, Ingrid’s new paintings are artist’s interpretations of her own en plein air photos from which are then executed in the studio in oil with a contemporary twist of a minimalist palette. The brush strokes and textures that she employs must be seen in person to fully appreciate the depth of these works, a true contemporary version of classic impressionism. Her dreamy and somewhat ominous landscape paintings in black and white seem to float before the viewer. She explains, “I am searching for an atmosphere of “Unheimlichkeit”, stillness and decay. Frozen scenes, like in a film-still, unrelated to time and within that given their dualism, is what fascinates me. The use of overexposure, through which areas that are painted as a flat surface of color, but in the context of the painting also reveal something figurative and three dimensional, are also such a dualism. The field of tension fascinates me.”

Ingrid’s works have been exhibited in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and the USA as well as in museums and numerous private collections. This will be her first exhibition in Berlin.

For more information on the artist and her works please contact : twowindowproject@yahoo.de

New paintings by STiNK!

Some of the new paintings by UK artist STiNK! in the exhibition Alone Together at Two Window Project in Berlin

top: Love, Greed, Hate, Envy - 2011, acrylic on canvas, 143 x 110 cm
middle: Bored - 2011, acrylic on canvas 55 x 121 cm
lower: A Big Thumbs Up for Destruction - 2011,acrylic on canvas, 55 x 115 cm


For more information on these and other works by STiNK! please contact: twowindowproject@yahoo.de



Alone Together - Ingrid Simons & STiNK! (Stephen Hiam)

on exhibition thru 23 April 2011 at:
Two Window Project
Torstrasse 154, D-10115 Berlin
www.twowindowproject.com

I paid a visit to the new STiNK! studio recently to get an update on the works in progress for the new exhibition Alone Together.
Here are some of the new paintings in various stages of completion that STiNK! is working on.
The middle image is of one of the 'scroll paintings' for which the artist hand built the dimensional framework and then adhered the canvas to. The completed 'scrolls' will be exhibited as part of a 'story board' tale of his colorful fantasy, but not so far from reality, version of the world we live in.

See them in all their glory along with the work of Ingrid Simons at Two Window Project
in Alone Together opening on Friday evening the 25 March 6:00 - 9:00 pm.

Alone Together - Ingrid Simons and STiNK! (Stephen Hiam)

Alone Together

opening reception: Friday evening the 25 March 6:00 – 9:00 pm

exhibition: 26 March – 23 April 2011

Two Window Project is proud to present the exhibition, ‘Alone Together’ featuring the works of two artists, Ingrid Simons of the Netherlands and STiNK! (Stephen Hiam) who is originally from the UK.

The common link for pairing these two artists for this exhibition comes from the source of their imagery; they both manifest them from the technologies of photography and video. It is these medias that inspire the two artists to paint their unique interpretations and create their own worlds on the canvas.

For this exhibition, Ingrid’s new paintings are artist’s interpretations of her own en plein air photos from which are then executed in the studio in oil with a contemporary twist of a minimalist palette. The brush strokes and textures that she employs must be seen in person to fully appreciate the depth of these works, a true contemporary version of classic impressionism. Her dreamy and somewhat ominous landscape paintings in black and white seem to float before the viewer. She explains, “I am searching for an atmosphere of “Unheimlichkeit”, stillness and decay. Frozen scenes, like in a film-still, unrelated to time and within that given their dualism, is what fascinates me. The use of overexposure, through which areas that are painted as a flat surface of color, but in the context of the painting also reveal something figurative and three dimensional, are also such a dualism. The field of tension fascinates me.”

Ingrid’s works have been exhibited in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and the USA as well as in museums and numerous private collections. This will be her first exhibition in Berlin.

STiNK! (Stephen Hiam) is highly skilled in the realm of video arts with a focus on special effects for which among other praises, has won him a coveted MTV video award. It is from this arena that he brings his highly charged work to the gallery, using his artistic moniker of ‘STiNK!’, to tell his stories in the medium of paint rather than on film.

As in each of his past series he builds from classic art concepts, references to the works of Muybridge and Man Ray for his previous group of paintings titled The Fallen from 2010. Now in his latest series, he depicts the story of a modern creation and evolution with the four dominant and reoccurring ideas of love, hate, envy & greed, as they are played out to us constantly by the news media, in print, on television and online. The stories of trysts, corporate scandals, dictators, wars, aggression and revolution all abound. These chronicles will be unfurled like a storyboard of the fast changing world that surrounds us at every turn. Presented in multi dimensional surfaces that are reminiscent of the flowing papyrus scrolls of a time long past, STiNK!’s newest paintings ablaze with color depict their own version of this fast paced current history. This will be his second featured artist exhibition at the gallery.

For additional information or preview please email to: twowindowproject@yahoo.de

Alone Together

Ingrid Simons and STiNK! (Stephen Hiam)

opening reception: Friday evening 25 March from 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Two Window Project

Torstrasse 154, D -10115 Berlin

www.twowindowproject.com

Abstract Art Takes Talent

Image: Hans Hofmann's "Laburnum" (1954) Courtesy Boston College

Article from www.artinfo.com on 07 March 2011:

How Psychologists and a Team of Monkeys, Babies, and Elephants Proved That Abstract Art Takes Talent

Not just anyone can make abstract art, and a degree in art is worth something — at least when it comes to judging an artwork. Such are the findings of a study recently released in the journal Psychology Science, which sought to put to bed the old my-child-could-paint-that canard about abstract art.

The study, performed by Boston College's Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner, involved 72 undergraduates, about half of whom — or 32, to be precise — were majoring in studio art. Participants were shown 30 paintings by Abstract Expressionists, which were paired with a painting by either a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant, with the pairs selected based on superficial similarities in terms of color and morphology. Respondents were then asked to guess which was which, but also which they preferred. Ten pairs were unlabeled, ten were incorrectly labeled, and ten were correctly labeled, so that the test would be able to measure to what extent information associated with the work biased taste.

The results? "In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality," reports Psychology Today, summarizing the findings. "And most of the time preferences were pretty immune to labels." Moreover, art students were less swayed by the mislabeling issue, and got the answers right more often.

Interestingly, by far the strongest bias effect was seen among non-art students when a work was correctly labeled. A mere 57.75 percent of these participants chose the correctly labeled painting as their favorite, but at the same time a whopping 79.25 percent correctly identified it as the real deal. In other words, the correct label really helped non-art students determine an artwork was actually art, but by no means did this make them like it any better. By comparison, the number of art students who picked the right work was the same under these conditions as the number who said that work was their favorite — 65.4 percent chose the actual Ab-Ex masterpiece as their "preference," while 65.51 percent correctly identified it as being by an adult human.

In a follow-up, Hawley-Dolan wrote to Psychology Today to point out a further aspect of the study of interest to art theorists: Apparently, when study participants were asked to explain why they picked the works that they chose as their favorites, they made more references to the painter's intentions when they were speaking about works that were actually by professional artists than when they were describing the child or animal artworks — regardless of labeling condition. In other words, somehow, viewers sensed which works were by mature humans.

"This finding shows that we can see the mind behind the art," Hawley-Dolan explained. "We see more than we think we do when we look at abstract art."

Upcoming event at Two Window Project:

Abstract artist Julia Bulik with her MFA from the Weissensee School will be co-featured in the exhibition Spaces In Between which will open at the gallery on Thursday evening the 28 April from 6:00 - 9:00 pm and be on exhibition thru 28 May 2011 and for Open Weekend of the Galerien Berlin-Mitte.