Yavuz Gallery is pleased to participate in Melbourne Art Fair 2022 with Scenes from an Infinite Sky, a solo presentation by André Hemer.
Scenes from an Infinite Sky presents a new series of paintings and a specially commissioned large-scale wall and video installation. It continues Hemer’s investigation of the bounds of materiality and appearances, and what it means to create paintings during a time in history in which the experience of an object is continuously blurred between states of the physical and the digital.
In his paintings, Hemer scans physical objects – three-dimensional paint forms or found objects such as flora – en plein air to capture a version of the object, and its surrounding exposure to the natural elements of the sun and sky alongside artificial lights from the scanner. His latest works in Scenes from an Infinite Sky are captured across one day on October 10th in Vienna, in particular, during sunset where the shift in sunlight conditions are most striking. The resulting images are of vibrant reds, gold, and orange, which are then recomposed, overpainted, and overlaid with three-dimensional sculptural elements to create deeply-layered and luscious works that render seamless the demarcation between digital, painted object and the digital artefact.
In Melbourne Art Fair, Hemer debuts a new large-scale video, Sky Sculpture (Melbourne/Vienna, October 10, 14:17 CEST) that features various abstracted paint forms spinning on their own axes in the afternoon sky. The landscape and its corresponding audio is an amalgamation of skies and atmospheric bird calls taken within two geographic locations of Melbourne and Vienna. Mounted against a wall installation of a skyscape featuring the same series of imagery, its material routes and forms are manifold and uncanny: in the rendered video of paint scans, the reproduced sky wallpaper, its original physical references – a metonym that speaks to our contemporary experience of the world and the dominance of the online as its gateway, one that has no end in sight.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
André Hemer (b. 1981) holds a PhD in Painting from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (Australia) and a MA from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), including a Postgraduate Research Residency at the Royal College of Art, London (UK).
He has exhibited widely in New Zealand, Australia, USA and internationally. Curated exhibitions include NFTism, curated by Kenny Schachter, Institut Co (2021); Watching Windows, curated by Andrew Clifford, Te Uru Contemporary Museum, Auckland (2017); André Hemer – Paintings 2005- 2015, Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua City, New Zealand (2015); Utopian Days, curated by Martin Schulze and Hailey Grenet, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2014); and Critical Intent, curated by Gary Sangster and Fan Lin, Guangzhou Art Center, Guangzhou, China (2014).
His work is in the collections of Taiwan Museum of Art; Te Manawa Museum (New Zealand); Christchurch Art Gallery (New Zealand); and University of Canterbury (New Zealand), amongst others. In 2016 Hemer was awarded the prestigious New Paramount Award from the Wallace Arts Trust and the New Zealand Arts Foundation New Generation Award. Artist residencies include: The Studios at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA (2020); International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, USA (2017), Cité International des Arts, Paris, France (2015); Seoul Museum of Art (2011); amongst others. Hemer has been featured in Thames and Hudson’s publication, “100 Painters of Tomorrow” (UK), and “Art and the Internet” by Blackdog, London (UK). He is currently based in Vienna, Austria.