O3 Gallery Website Presents : Future exhibitions

Exhibition open:  15.07.14 – 20.07.14

Through a series of abstract paintings and prints based on disjointed words and phrases, Writing for 5 aims to evaluate the relationship between poetry and abstraction. Phrases are enacted within the paintings ambiguously so that the original intentions of the poetry are brought into question. This ensures that no “trace of that objective reality which makes up the normal background of our everyday existence” (Michael Seuphor, 1958) thus adhering to cultural expectations of abstraction”.

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Exhibition open: 26.07.14 – 17.08.14

Light, Land & Place is an exhibition of atmospheric paintings by Oxfordshire-based artist Caroline Meynell. Meynell’s work is an exploration of the interplay between the light, land and space within landscapes which hold a personal significance to the artist. As a painter, Meynell has developed her style using bold and strong colour which reflect the form, contours and light of the land. She paints with thin layers of oil paints, which are built up gradually and slowly. This technique produces a richness of depth and translucency.

Caroline Meynell was awarded the Mary Moser prize in 2013 and has created a series of paintings especially for the exhibition at the O3 Gallery.

Read the press release here

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Exhibition open: 14.09.14 – 5.10.14

‘Restwert’ brings together work from two contemporary German photographers, Dietmar Eckell and Matthias Heiderich. The exhibition includes a selection of pieces from Eckell’s long-running project ‘Restwert’ which examines the residue of human occupation in and inscription onto the landscape. Eckell’s forlorn aircraft and abandoned monuments present the diminishing traces of social and historical events, of political experiences and of innumerable personal narratives; his landscapes evoke the relentless passage of time and seem proof of the inevitable advance of social entropy.

Matthias Heiderich’s architectural photographs are characterised by an interest in geometric form and hyper-saturated colour; the physical concreteness of his subjects is translated (through the lens) into vibrant abstractions. Needless to say that this euphoric geometry finds its antecedent in the immaculate forms of modernist visual language. Parallels can be drawn with Karl-Hugo Schmölz’s images of 1950s Cologne though in Heiderich’s case, not burdened by that unspoken but implicit post-trauma of reconstruction.

With this in mind, the concrete, architectural subjects which Heiderich photographs become ever more insubstantial edifices; these are structures as image. Depth as surface, texture as pattern. One could almost imagine a hyper-image of this kind might previously have adorned one of Dietmar Eckell’s now stripped bill boards. One function of this foregrounding of the image is of course to destabilise the relationship (or assumed equivalence) between the photograph and ‘the thing itself’. At the heart of this iconoclastic admission is the recognition of photography’s residual relationship to the photographed.

Matthias Heiderich is a self-taught German photographer based in Berlin. Since 2010 he has exhibited in the United States and across Europe including solo shows at Audi Art Gallery in St. Petersburg, Carte Blanche in San Francisco and Spot Galerie in Berlin. Heiderich has contributed to Danielle Krysa’s Creative Block, Echoes of the Future (Gestalten Verlag) and Zitty Berlin Buch, and been featured in Vogue and L’Officiel amongst others. Heiderich’s work featured in Restwert was shot between 2012 and 2014 from the series, Spektrum Eins + Zwei (Berlin 2012), West / Ost (Berlin 2013), and Reflexiones / Reflexionen (Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, 2013 – 2014).

Dietmar Eckell is a German photographer and adventurer whose work explores the ‘Restwert’ (residual value) of abandoned objects. The aesthetics of decay, the stories behind the write-offs and the memories they evoke make these objects worth documenting. Dietmar Eckell’s photographs attempts to underline the temporality of man made objects, human endeavours and perception by capturing them in nature’s endlessly regenerative growth. The series ‘Happy End’ shows aircraft which occupy remote crash-sites and has recently been published in book-form.