Bourouina Gallery

BERLIN

Events at the Fair

17 March 11:00 Exhibition: ADAM SAKS - ATROPA

Bourouina is pleased to present the Danish artist Adam Saks’s third solo show at the gallery.

Since his successful solo show in spring 2011, the work of Adam Saks has undergone a continual process of research and further development: his change of medium—from oil colour to acrylics—was already a significant factor in the works presented at his last exhibition Follow You Follow Me. The shift, according to Saks, marked an important act of liberation with regard to his working process. Now, with his new acrylic paintings subsumed under the title Atropa, Saks presents us with an exponentiated, yet more concentrated painterly power. These paintings are denser and more intense; he has arrived at a greater breadth of painterly volume. In place of the explosive gestural tumultuousness often integral to his work from the past, his compositions now provide an implosive maximisation of strength and energy.

Atropa refers to a nightshade species of flowering and psychoactive drug-bearing plants designated as Atropa belladonna, or Death Cherries. Saks keeps the symbolism of the opium poppy ambiguous, thus unfurling widely formed fields of meaning. Dream, intoxication, sleep, impermanence and death are the themes around which his accomplished painterly universe revolves. The relationship between humankind and nature, existence und expiration are among the concerns Saks has handled in previous works. In these latest paintings, Saks veritably dredges through the depths. He lays and lifts veils, which lie over, and under, the motifs. In a process of progressive diffusion, figures appear upon the canvas, only to become disbanded in the next moment by means of colour. Often, the delineation between painting and objects is blurred in the process. Motifal concentrates such as opium poppy pods, animal figures and skeletal remains are part of an inner-civilisational wilderness, in which—due to the painterly overlapping of motifs and disparate temporal planes—even parallel worlds would seem to exist.

Saks’s extraordinary palette is rooted in darkness: dark, shadowy swaths entangle black contours; white veils of mist and fog encounter watery, transparent colour fields or sometimes dense and rich colour islands. Saks infuses his paintings with a mysterious and exotic atmosphere, in which real ‘energy fields’ open up. The spectator dives into marvellously wide fields of meaning and experiences that the unknown is still possible to discover.

The exhibition contains twelve acrylic works as well as new drawings—the latter being viewed by Saks as part of an ‘experimentum’ for his large-scale paintings. The small oil pencil drawings correspond, in the intimacy of their formats, with the concentrated density of the acrylic works, though still remaining within their own cosmos.