The gallery FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph looks forward to presenting its new gallery space with the start of the fall 2017 season.We will launch the new location with two solo exhibitions: Johanna von Monkiewitsch (Cologne; sculpture) and GL Brierley (London; painting).

With her oil paintings on wood and aluminum, GL Brierley (born 1965 in London) creates a series of portrait paintings and objects that oscillate between abstraction and guration, seduction and horror, the human and the grotesque.The artist’s work features individual subjects (“Roughshod”), subjects engaged in dialogue (“King”), as well as simple fragments that resemble still lifes (“Lips”). The viewer is, above all, drawn to the paintings’ delicate presentation and lively materiality:The paint looks corporeal and alive; it congeals and reacts alchemically, casting ambiguous folds in a unique materiality – all while demonstrating a virtuoso use of light.

Taking the symbolic gure of the hermaphrodite as its starting point,“REBIS” is the title of Brierley’s second solo exhibition at Feld- buschWiesnerRudolph. In these works, the artist creates new spaces within her paintings, spaces that make use of theater props to create a type of screen, like the one we see in “Blue Wall” or “Spotted Wall,” a screen that ser ves as both a visual blocker and room divider, while posing riddles and arousing curiosity through its hybrid nature. All pictorial elements are given the same ornamental treatment, which means that the viewer’s gaze freely roams across the entire image: ligree inlays in sharp angular shapes are applied to the wood paneling, simulating a oor covering that appears abruptly foreshortened. Broad brushstrokes rich in contrast generate a gure that looks like a linear woven strip. It is punctuated with parasitic color sequences that freely resemble imaginary coverings and garments. In sharp contrast, thick applications of color dot the surface here and there in an almost terroristic act, whizzing across the entire pictorial narrative in an almost drone-like manner.

Based on the gure of the hermaphrodite, GL Brierley’s gures – constructed from arrangements resembling still lifes – are such that they raise awareness about the fact that the body, as a bearer of social identity, is always implicated in role play. Her paintings serve as a stage for diverse forms of reconciliation and transformation between the male and female, mind and material, body and object. Brierley accordingly describes her ongoing fascination with painting as follows:“(...)There is no other medium whose corporeality can exist so autonomously, while simultaneously describing an illusion. In an almost magical act, material, which is positioned in a certain way, permits the eye to enter the painting’s surface.”

The artist sees her views on painting re ected in the writings of Freud and Kristeva: Even as the child’s paradoxical desire is expres- sed somewhere between the signposts of its attraction and simultaneous rejection of the mother, it is able to transform this desire into a certain sublimation of the mother by way of xating on an object.. As such, on Brierley’s pictorial stages, we sometimes see theatrically grotesque themes tilt over and collapse into a sort of pantomime-like comedy. In addition to its representational quality, paint is thus always also paint as material. In an interview, Brierley symbolically plays with the term “base-matter” as a word rooted in the term mater, which also means “mother” in Latin and Greek, gracefully fusing two concepts: object and desire.

GL Brierley (*1965, UK) completed her Masters in visual arts at the College of Art in London and graduated with an M.F.A. from Goldsmith College, London, in 2007. Her works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Galerie FeldbuschWiesner (2015, 2013), Carlslaw St. Lukes in London (2012) and Natalia Goldin Galerie, Stockholm, Sweden (2008), as well as in the following group exhi- bitions: So It Grows! An Intimate Eye, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2017), I Prefer Life. Reydan Weiss Collection, Museum Weserburg, Bremen (2016/17), My Abstract World, ME Collectors Room, Berlin (2016), La Maison Rouge, Paris (2011), and in the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004). Her works are represented in renowned collections, including the Damien Hirst Collection, London, the Olbricht Collection, Düssel- dorf, and the Reydan Weiss Collection, Germany.The artist lives and works in London.