Straight from Berlin: Uwe Kowski and Jörg Herold

Ruiz-Healy Art, in collaboration with Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig / Berlin, is pleased to present Straight from Berlin: Paintings and Works on Paper by Uwe Kowski and Jörg Herold. The exhibition will open on March 27th with an artist reception and book signing from 6 - 8 pm. Uwe Kowski and Jörg Herold are acclaimed as members of the New Leipzig School, a group of artists identified with Neo Rauch who were born in then-East Germany and trained at the traditionally-inclined Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts). Recognized and championed by galerist Gerd Harry Lybke of Galerie EIGEN + ART, Kowski and Herold have achieved international recognition for their use of highly-tuned skills to express questions of value and direction in a time of indecision, loss, and anomie. This collaborative exhibition at Ruiz-Healy Art offers American viewers a rare opportunity to see their newest work.

Uwe Kowski was born in 1963, and apprenticed as a sign painter before taking up studies in painting at the Leipzig Academy. Using elements of figuration, text, and references to landscape, Kowski’s paintings often appear to have been created spontaneously, but are highly-constructed formal works that exist on the boundaries of traditions of realism and abstraction. However, says the artist: “I don’t see myself as an abstract painter because any painter is basically abstract if they are any good.”

Born in 1965 in Leipzig, Jörg Herold, like Kowski, also began his training outside the fine arts, learning stucco work before attending the Leipzig Academy of Visual Art--where he met Uwe Kowski--and the Weissensee Art Academy, in Berlin. Herold, whose works embrace painting, collage, performance, and film, came to international renown through his participation at the Venice and Sydney biennales and documenta X. Calling himself a “documentary archaeologist,” Herold takes trips to lands both literal and imaginary to recapture lost histories, recounting stories that range from Joseph Beuys mythic crash and salvation in the Crimea during WWII, to confrontations with the birth of racist theory in artifacts found in the Republic of Georgia. In his new pieces presented in Straight from Berlin, Herold uses found photographic images of idyllic rural scenes which are digitally printed, then washed with stain, watercolor, and Chinese ink. Like the effects of the onslaught of experience on harbored definitions, his painterly overlays cast a quivering filter over a past that refuses to settle into resolution.