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Indepth Arts News:
"Justin Quinn and Werner Linster : Drawing from Ideas - Zwischen Lesen und Sehen"
2010-03-25 until 2010-05-08
Cain Schulte Gallery Berlin
Berlin, ,
DE Germany
Cain Schulte Gallery Berlin is pleased to announce the exhibition 'Drawing from Ideas - the distance between reading and seeing', introducing artists Justin Quinn and Werner Linster to the Berlin audience. The exhibition opens with a reception on March 25th at 7pm and is on view until May 8th, 2010. Both artists use literature as the primary source of ideas with the overlap of literature and art being explicit. Quinn transcribes Melville's Moby Dick into drawings and prints with solely the letter 'E'. Linster draws his inspirations from studying ancient writing systems, such as the pictographs of the Chinese Shang dynasty, or the 'Gaunerzinken', the secret language of gypsies, hobos, vagabonds and peddlers, as well as literature by Joyce, Beckett and manuscripts of Wittgenstein.
Justin Quinn translates his personal obsessions into exquisitely subtle artwork that explores, amplifies, and ultimately celebrates the single element and the repetitive. By rewriting Herman Melville's epic Moby Dick into this simplified system, we see the transformation of a classic text into strings of letterforms that are at once majestic and impulsive. Using chapters as sources for the works, he transforms the text into labyrinthine and spiraling compositions that call to mind Captain Ahab's monomaniacal quest for the White Whale.
This letter 'E' has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet, presenting a universal yet unreadable language. This simplified system allows Quinn to explore the distance between reading and seeing.
Since 1999, Quinn's works on paper have been included in over eighty exhibitions, both national and international. His teaching, his exhibitions, and his role as a moderator and panelist at national conferences currently make Quinn one of the most brilliant figures in printmaking. Justin Quinn lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Werner Linster's fascination with ancient and modern pictograms, which he intensely studies and copies, lead him to creating wonderful, delicate and humorous ideograms, graphics representing ideas or concepts. In the case of
the work inspired by Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the drawings are freely associated with the text. Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece of neologisms, a text composed in a uniquely complex linguistic style, which offers endless amounts of source material for Linster's drawings. For Linster, Joyce's neologisms are compressed linguistic images, which in all simplicity become scribbled sculptures with multiple perspectives. The table, often used by philosophers as a clear symbol for reality, offers a convincing pedestal for Linster's pictograms. As he holds in thought the visuals of pictograms from ancient China, Gaunerzinken, Beckett's doodle drawings, or Wittgenstein's pictorial explanations; Linster has the ability to capture fluid and free associations deriving from texts. He amazes and amuses us with delicate objects, which sometimes appear with such spontaneity, that they have to be captured in the instant on anything available - on matchboxes, napkins when sitting in a restaurant waiting for food, grocery receipts or shopping lists.
Werner Linster lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He had many solo and group shows in galleries in Freiburg, Mainz, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome and London. He studied art and art teaching in Mainz, and likes to involve himself with interdisciplinary projects.
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