"focus: Magnus von Plessen"
2005-06-02 until 2005-08-31
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA

Magnus Von Plessen (b. Germany, 1967) is a remarkable young painter from Hamburg presently working in Berlin. Von Plessen, an accomplished student of the history of painting and a keen social observer, began to explore the possibilities of painting only after working with film and photography for several years. The results of his investigations are small, beautiful images of intimate proportion and incidental subject matter that bear an important relationship to photography, while retaining the materiality of the medium of paint. His work is distinguished by its immediacy, as well as by its transparent simplicity of pictorial means.

Painted on small canvases, portraits, scenes of daily activities, simple actions and architectural views sometimes appear from a monochrome background, and other times dissolve into it. His economical and direct expressions are virtual lexicons of brushstrokes: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal marks constitute a matrix where the various motifs appear with tremendous intensity, emerging from an absence of space. The relationship between photography and this approach to painting reveals itself both in von Plessen's propensity to extract and frame the particular, as well as in the sizes of his canvases.

For his focus exhibition at the Art Institute, von Plessen will create a new body of works on canvas.

Organizer:  focus: Magnus von Plessen is organized by The Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator:  James Rondeau, Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Department of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago.

IMAGE
  Magnus von Plessen
Lying Figure, 2003
Oil on canvas
25 1/2 x 37 1/2 inches 65 x 95 cm

Related Links:

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Other Important Exhibitions in Chicago