Amir Nikravan

ARNDT Berlin is delighted to present two solo positions by the Philippino artist Jigger Cruz and the US American  artist Amir Nikravan at this years' "abc - art berlin contemporary" 2014.

September 18 - September 21, 2014 | 12 am - 7 pm

ARNDT Berlin is proud to announce the participation of auspicious young artist Jigger Cruz in this years edition of abc ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY 2014.

Jigger Cruz (Philippines, 1984) creates assemblages of recognizable objects and obscure shapes which interlace, envelope and unfurl within one another. Simultaneously tempered and fueled by scientific-based inspired titles, elements such as satellite disks, bicycle wheels, coiling striped horns and sprays of particles are within these shuffling vortexes of the nonsensical. The focus, aided by a fairly subdued palette, turns to configuration which leads the lingering visual experience into its stormy yet measured rocking.

Before he started exhibiting again in the middle of 2011, Jigger Cruz decided to stop painting for a year.  He felt frustrated at his lack of commercial success. Jigger came back with a vengeance.  These days, Manila’s art collectors can’t get enough of his pieces, paintings he once described as “wasak na talaga” or deconstructions.  He enjoyed the idea of vandalizing images he carefully reconstructed from old masters’ paintings, defacing his own work with globs of pigment squeezed directly from the tube, even running some spray paint over them as his final flourish.

Selected Solo Exhibition 
2013  Depth Circus, West Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines
2012  Glitch Habitation, Primae Noctis, Lugano, Switzerland
         Spatial Soother, West Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines 
         Birth Of The Party Bantam Paintings, Secret Fresh, San Juan City, Philippines
2011  Dead End, West Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines  
         Anti-Depressants On Paper, Crucible Gallery, Mandaluyong City, Philippines
2009  Constructing Deconstruction, Tala Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines
2008  Swing, Blanc Art Space, Makati City, Philippines

Selected Group Exhibition   
2013
Abstrakt, Michael Haas / CFA Berlin, Germany
Milan Art Fair, Primo Marella, Milan, Italy
Bologna Art Fair, Primo Marella Gallery, Italy
Abstraction, Lost and Found, Taksu, Singapore
Surface Default, Light And Space Contemporary, Manila, Philippines

PRESS
Jigger Cruz Superstar | ART Explainer | May, 2014
KÜNSTLERFÜHRER BERLIN JIGGER CRUZ | ART Berlin| September, 2014

The second artist Amir Nikravan (California, 1983) presented and curated by ARNDT Berlin together with Amir Shariat in this years abc ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY 2014 lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Looking at works from Amir Nikravan might provoke a calm feeling. This results from the balanced construction, the immanent composure and the evident depth. The works show the deliberate process of the artist creating these works.  He applies elementary materials such as asphalt, cement, color, stone to a rough surface – the beginning of a careful, contemplative procedure.

Process is central to Nikravan’s practice. The artist transforms his works from paintings to a sculptural relief, to indexical photographic positives, and back to paintings that present themselves as sculpturally flat objects. It all begins with a choice of basic building materials. Through his working model, Nikravan uses multiple mediums to activate historical and philosophical touchstones of objecthood. His works evince the gaps between image and experience, making explicit the disconnect between sight and touch, absence and presence, desire and possession. The viewer is asked to reconcile the displacement of object, author and labor, with the asynchronous temporality of the image; that which looks as if it was not made but has just arrived. Materials are built up in layers until a temporary sculpture emerges. Fabric is then applied through a vacuform process so that a three-dimensional shape remains imprinted on the surface. Indeed, the textile will forever depict the imperfections of the original materials; subsequent layers of spray paint produce a positive form once the air is removed. This unusual process is notable in the sense that a void is created which, through a common chemical reaction, is forever crystallized into a new object that documents the existence of a sculpture that we will never see. Once the fabric is mounted and stretched, the initial roughness is transformed into a perfectly rendered image of an imperfect surface — opposites that now cohabit a state of stable harmony.

The artist declares to be interested in the mono-ha movement. He gets inspired by this group of artists of the 20th century who follow thoughts of the land art movement, fluxus and conceptual art.

Solo Exhibitions
2014 (Forthcoming), Various Small Fires, Hollywood, CA
2012 Gemini, Pepin Moore, Los Angeles, CA
2011 Internal, Contemporary Arts Center, Irvine, CA
2010 Thresholds, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Please click here for further information about Amir Nikravan

We are looking forward to see you there!
If you have any further questions, please contact Lisa Polten (lisa@arndtberlin.com).

AMIR NIKRAVAN
Masks

Solo exhibition at ARNDT Singapore

December 13, 2015 - January 17, 2016

Opening | Saturday | December 12, 2015, from 4 - 7 pm | at ARNDT Singapore

Despite their impasto appearance, Amir Nikravan’s paintings are optical mirages that fuse painting, photography and sculpture in a process that produces indexical veracity and illusionism but results in completely flat images; they are photorealistic ‘still life’ paintings of paintings, posing both a subtle critique and paradoxical demonstration of abstract painting’s ability to elicit the fundamental complexities of art and objecthood.

This December, ARNDT is pleased to present Masks, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the American artist. For his first solo exhibition with the gallery Nikravan will present a selection of works that perform the process of masking - covering, blocking, disguising - in both literal and metaphorical ways.

Central to Nikravan’s artistic practice is the technique in which his works are made. Paintings begin in a traditional manor with the build up of many layers over time, only to be transformed and eventually destroyed. Once a painting is finished Nikravan wraps it in fabric and submits it to the forces of an industrial vacuum bag, creating a temporary topographical mold of the paintings’ surface. This cloaked and covered object is then painted with an airbrush, using various colors to approximate the raking light and shadow across the surface of the wrapped object; through this an indexical photographic image of the object becomes imbedded on the fabric, which is peeled from the form and mounted. The original painting is then destroyed. What remains for the viewer is a vividly insistent image; an illusion of the now inaccessible object.

Further heightening the illusionist quality of his works, Nikravan juxtaposes repetitive gestures, strokes, and lines upon the rigid grids of cinderblock and brick walls backdrops. For Nikravan, the wall performs as the ultimate metaphor for contemporary abstraction, acting as a confrontational limitation of space which the viewer is confronted and rejected, ultimately forcing them back into the space of the physical and psychological. The compression of space enacted between Nikravan’s painted marks and the underlying backgrounds they obscure perform the ontological planes of reality as a visual narrative for the viewer, eliciting through sight what can only be experienced in the physical realm.

In addition, Nikravan will introduce a new branch of works that enact the same conceptual strategy through a differing visual motif. In his Mask paintings, Nikravan literalizes the idea of blocking and obscuring by physically masking out parts of a painting. In these works simple shapes are layered and removed continually until a complex shape with many faceted openings emerges, creating window like openings and exposing the actual ground of the work itself- the canvas - as the ultimate structure/wall on which illusionism and representation take form.

ARNDT Singapore
Gillman Barracks
9 Lock Road #03-21
Singapore 108937
Tel. +65 67340775
info@arndtfineart.com