For Immediate Release:
Frank Nitsche
“WINTERORBIT, recent paintings”
March 26 through April 28th
opening reception Tuesday March 26, 6-9pm

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Berlin artist, Frank Nitsche. With gestures that echo elaborate urban graffiti, Nitsche’s works suggest a cyber-punk abstraction that is the visual equivalent of JG Ballard’s Crash. With vague allusions to portraiture, and crushed, but still glistening chrome, ala John Chamberlain sculptures, his paintings do not so much depict an abstraction of form as much as they depict a destruction of form. This inherent aggression of a violated form is delineated in graphic lines that appear and disappear beneath chunks or veils of colors that remain at once optimistic and eerily nostalgic.

Speed, mechanical potentiality, and gravitational consequences are all touched upon, but Nitsche is not simply a chronicler of abstracted catastrophes. Within each collapsing form is an image germinating into being. The paintings divulge a synchronization between the heft of a muscular line and the ethereality of a floating geometric shape.

Cataloguing clippings from newspapers and magazine illustrations, Nitsche’s collection of reference material are not a direct link to and offer no clue to the content of his paintings. They serve instead as a compressed and conserved media diary. His systematic filing of resource material perhaps most closely influences the titles of his paintings, which are in fact simply serial numbers. His sources however, are digested and ruminated upon, later appearing in an outlined form upon a canvas as if through the process of some imagistic osmosis.

Frank Nitsche has a concurrent exhibition at Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin and has been also recently showing at Daniel Templon, Paris and Jay Jopling’s White Cube 2, London. This marks his debut solo exhibition in New York City.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6pm.
For more information or visuals, please contact Elizabeth Balogh or Nicole Russo at the gallery.