v e r a m u n r o

v e r a
m u n r o
JĀNIS AVOTIŅŠ
There Are No White Spaces
O pening:
November 27th 2012, 7 pm
Duration:
November 28th until January 26th 2013
Upcoming exhibitions:
Günther Förg
O pening:
February 26th 2013
ARC O , Madrid
February 13th until 18th 2013
Jānis Avotiņš, 2012, oil on canvas, 69 x 80 cm
Dear friends of the gallery, We would like to draw your attention to our upcoming exhibition ”There Are No White Spaces” by Jānis Avotiņš. Born in Latvia in 1981, Avotiņš graduated from the Latvian Acadamy of Arts and took part in various international solo and group shows. We are proud to present his newest works for the first time in our gallery. The pictures of Jānis Avotiņš seem like apparitions; they have great presence and yet remain intangible, fleeting and delicate. It is immediatly visible how they construct a form of their own in their kind of allusion and omission, a form able to capture a moment or reproduce an atmosphere that can find expression only in this way. What Avotiņš formulates in painting is related to reality, and yet knows no reality outside the picture. What interests Avotiņš in his art is the ineffable, and something essential about it is its particular way of keeping silence. Avotiņš pictorial world is thoroughly representational and figurative, thus, even through broadly embraced colour spaces and seemingly fluid light, still sketching an idea of reality and a specific form of representation very precise in its own way. In his paintings, he always conceives encounters or certain constellations of figure and surroundings as mental and emotional space with timeless and moment‐bound, objective and subjective aspects of reality overlaying and interpenetrating each other. Here the view of reality formulated in the picture is verified by the way the real is mirrored in poetic space. galerie vera munro • heilwigstrasse 64 • 20249 hamburg fon +49-40-474746 • fax +49-40-472550 • gallery@veramunro.de
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In Avotiņš painting, the levels of object and expression combine here to form a new element, a field of perception, sliding like a fine membrane between the world and its depiction, thus creating connections aiming at the moment and the experience of its pictorial content. Avotiņš thereby operates with forms that might be read mimetically or else might be sensed as colour‐space volumes and perceived independently of any concepts. At this point landscape is simultaneously abstract, psychological, and in some way even objective pictorial space . „I avoid the unambiguous“, he says, for „all too easily it turns illustrative and of course I try to be honest in my painting.“ (Jens Asthoff) We would be glad if you planned to report on the exhibition. The artist will be in Hamburg for the installation of the show and will be available for interviews. Artists represented by the gallery: Eriks Apalais, Janis Avotins, John M Armleder, Silvia Bächli, Jean‐Marc Bustamante, Helmut Dorner, Günther Förg, Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Clay Ketter, IMI Knoebel, Linda McCue, Miwa Ogasawara, Kohei Nawa, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Wawrzyniec Tokarski, Franz‐Erhard Walther, Maja Weyermann, Paul Winstanley