SNOWBLIND

But never where we’re going.
They always show us where we’ve been, 
 Our footprints always follow us…

AA Milne via WTP.

 
It may be more scholarly to begin with a quote not offered up by a stuffed bear but there you go… and as Pooh also said “wherever you go there you are” … though that may be mis-attributed but let’s pretend it’s not.
 
Whatever, whoever said this I am intrigued by the notion of a trail of footprints leading us ahead, one step at a time, in both darkness and in light – fumbling forwards in a state of relative blindness.

I have the sense that sometimes painters operate as if in a snowstorm – seeking to secure vision out of nothingness and then offering it back to us poor souls – we who are so dependent on maps and defined coordinates – on being told where to go and what to see.

The artists in this exhibition demonstrate the leap of faith that making something demands. The works in this exhibition are neither pious nor didactic as is the fashion, rather they rely on a deeper intrinsic confidence in process and judgement, and most importantly they offer us a glimpse of what vision can be if you don’t simply rely on your eyes and set the map to one side.

Fox Jensen & Fox Jensen McCrory are delighted to be presenting the paintings of Shila Khatami for the first time in Australasia. Currently Khatami’s are included in the major exhibition No Illusions at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Curated by Dr Alexander Klar the exhibition explores the “characteristics and limits of the medium of painting, based on different contemporary positions”.

Living and working in Berlin, Khatami was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and has been awarded a further major grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds in 2023.

Khatami’s works have travelled to New Zealand alongside major paintings of Hanns Kunitzberger. Kunitzberger’s paintings have been exhibited in the projects Raven & Plastic Soul and in a solo exhibition in the Sydney gallery in 2019. Recently a major acquisition of Hanns Kunitzberger was also exhibited at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in the exhibition In the Past it was Always Now, alongside Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Willem De Kooning & Cy Twombly.

The gallery is delighted to bring these new works to New Zealand and to present them alongside wonderful new works by Coen Young, Jenny Topfer and special works by Bill Culbert.

Andrew Jensen, 2023