Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape V, 2018
Installation view
Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape II, 2018
Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape VI, 2018
Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape III, 2018
Andrew Birk, Seascape VIII, 2018
Installation view
Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape VII, 2018
Installation view
Andrew Birk, Seascape IV, 2018
Installation view
Installation view
In a postcard, the sunset pours impossible colors onto the ocean and the land. With the small piece of printed paper in his hands, the new romantic subject imagines himself alone and shrunk before the wonder of nature, staring into the distance, beholding speechless and breathless.
The sunset is the image of a promise, an expectation, the dream of a future; the breaking day brings brand new possibilities wrapped in the veil of dawn. We imagine the new day as the Paradise that the postcard was trying to sell: cutting off everything that falls outside of the vision field, it turns into an idyllic framed image.
When we think about what our desires will be like, we take things that we already know and organize them in new compositions that excite us and soothe us, against the background of unknown fate. Every time we draw onto nothingness we move forward. With every trace, new branches are born. Every void is a can- vas and every line can be a horizon.
Andrew Birk presents a series of large-scale paintings for his first exhibition at Karen Huber Gallery in Mexico City. Going back to one of the most rejected materials in contemporary art, reserved for amateurs, Birk uses watercolor in large format to paint enormous bodies of water and air. These two elements, of ever- changing appearance and total dependence on the light projected on them, are shown in Birk’s work in the whole spectrum of their possibilities. Embracing the corny quality associated with both the material and the image of the postcard, the artist shows a candid optimism before great life changes, the end of a cycle and a new start. After all, bound by the spectator, dusk and dawn are only two specif- ic points of one same circle.
Sira Pizà, October 2018
