Undercurrent is pleased to present Dominik Halmer'ssolo exhibition Shields. The Berlin based artist is known for his image-objects, expanding painting into physical space.
At Undercurrent he is showing nine new shaped-canvas works. The recurring question at the center of Dominik Halmer‘s practice is: what makes us see the world, or respectively the pictorial space, as a unity rather than an assemblage of individual, scattered elements? What does the mind need to construct an impression of coherent reality?
Combining all sorts of painting techniques – gestural painting, spraying, creating hand marks, using stencils – sometimes enhanced by everyday objects (like fringes in the case of KULP-shield or MUN-shield), Halmer creates closed entities. Those entities consist of loose gestures, defined geometric shapes and visual analogies that suggest a coherence and kinship between the individual works through repetition: the recurring hand marks which remind us of the first painterly gestures of cavemen, the glitter circles, the thin streaks connecting the different image parts – adding up to a wide range of formal diversity. Despite their diversity, the pictorial elements on the respective Shield works develop their own pictorial logic and ultimately define the form the canvases are shaped.
The exhibition title Shields pays reference to the Dutch word for painting “schilderen“. In German the word “Schild“ means both a shield (to protect oneself) as well as a sign as in traffic sign. Halmer plays with this etymology and creates his own pictorial signs by inventing very specific shapes and references. Some of the works (like ZUM-shield or EX-shield) evoke associations of open books spilling out their narratives, while the fringe works make us think of domestic functional objects like carpets or the head-profile work (KULP-shield) becomes its own character once we connect the respective elements to its facial expression.
Following the different traces, Halmer‘s paintings show us how pictures are being built – in fact: how our notion of reality and continuum is always constructed by our perceptive filters.
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Dominik Halmer (*1978 in Munich, Germany) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf Germany with Albert Oehlen. Halmer's work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among them are major institutional venues such as the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (Exhibition Space of the Federal Republic of Germany), the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum of Arts Wiesbaden, Marta Herford, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art Newark. Next to numerous private collections, his work is part of permanent public collections, such as the Collection for Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundeskunstsammlung), the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Museum Wiesbaden and CCA Andratx. Since 2022 he holds a professorship for abstract painting at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Bonn, Germany.
