MANILA, Philippines – Berlin-based printmakers and artists Christian Gfeller and Anna Hellsgard are featured in “Re: Surgo!,” on view at the Department of Avant-Garde Clichés, 2289 Pasong Tamo Extension, UPRC III Building, Makati City.
The duo also held a printmaking workshop at the gallery.
The artistic activities of Christian “Meeloo” Gfeller (b. 1973) and Anna Hellsgård (b. 1980) are wide and far-reaching, encompassing such varied ventures as an independent publishing house, a curatorial platform, a gallery, a silkscreen studio, a design studio and illustration agency, next to their sustained individual and collaborative art practice (paintings photography, artist books, installations).
The exhibition “Re:Surgo!” is the first solo exhibition of Gfeller & Hellsgård in the Philippines and presents recent prints and paintings.
Each piece in the series of large-scale unique prints “Reality is Only a Rorschach Ink-Blot, My Dear” is titled after a chapter of the literary classic Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. In the large-format, labor-intensive prints, the artists continue their exploration of the possibilities of screenprinting as a medium and expand their characteristically genre-blurring creative practice. The prints are a mise-en-abyme of media and techniques.
The series of paintings “Ghana Metal Kings” places seemingly disparate elements of 20th century political history alongside pop culture imagery. The paintings are like a seductive yet nightmarish fantastical vision of our contemporary media environment. The fragmented stimuli of pictorial references cross and overlap like broadcast signal noise. Portraits of notorious figures of power (dictators and other political leaders) are deconstructed and rearranged within a surreal visual panorama which may include disembodied limbs, digital glitches or typographical references to 1980s metal bands. The aesthetic and contextual clash however is strangely harmonious, softened by the meticulous execution of the Ghanaian artisan painters of film posters commissioned by Gfeller& Hellsgård, a fantastical and inspiring genre to which Bongoût previously dedicated a book.
For information, call 817-2042 or 0916-2459221, e-mail dagcgallery@gmail.com, visit www.dagcgallery.com, or follow the gallery on Facebook (dagcgallery manila) and Twitter (@dagcgallery).