Matter and Colour - Taubert Contemporary - Berlin
Taubert Contemporary is pleased to present recent works, matter and colour by Huseyin Sami. This is Sami’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Berlin. Typically, the artist’s work engages painting, sculpture and installation to explore aspects of time, action and process through the disruption of particular forms. In matter and colour, the 'Skin paintings’ display Sami’s exclusive medium - decor house acrylic. In these works, signature softer hues consisting of muted-soft pastels are juxtaposed with clinical black, white and grays - colours which aren't necessarily appreciated but which are commonplace in suburbia. They announce a soft eroticism of colour, particularly in its draped forms and seemingly-wet, glistening surfaces. Much like the spatial concepts evident in action paintings by Fontana, Pollock, Benglis and the re-stretched canvas of Parrino, surfaces are a fertile ground for blurring the distinction between two and three dimensions. Sami manipulates paint to claim back a form of realism, and to obliquely explore the looped and superficial violence we experience on the screens of today's technology. In matter and colour, Sami for the first time paints the gallery walls to explore the opposition of matte colour. Habitual processes are also pushed to harness new challenges associated with larger formats.
The canvas is used as a horizontal surface, whereby each ‘skin’ is made with an initial process of gestural pours, and layered colour compositions become the result of numerous interventions - forensic manipulations of cutting, grafting and folding the skins onto the canvas surface. This is an approach of abstraction characterised by the entanglement of forms with odd but tangible properties. In fact, one of the defining traits of the artist’s work is a simultaneous invitation to touch and to repel the desire to touch. As experiential conundrums they continue Sami’s interest in relationships between the body, physical processes of perception and the actions they elicit. In doing so, the artist explores an eruption of ‘the Real’ to create something uncanny, alluring and strange. This is a place where boundaries begin to break down into moments of static change, and the sober gravity of ‘the Real’ is allowed to take hold. One is reminded of certain disturbances, like the change of state in the surface of cooling hot milk, or how skin is grown in a lab for grafting. Dichotomies of harmony and violence hang in the balance and, as the artist says, serve to remind us of our own materiality, a state where we confront boundaries between ‘me’ and ‘other’, pedestrian and novel, real and artifice. Huseyin Sami was born 1979 in the United Kingdom and currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
– Romy Hansford-Gerber
