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ARTCAT



German Tagle: New Empire

Elga Wimmer
526 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor, 212-206-0006
Chelsea
November 17 - December 19, 2009
Reception: Thursday, November 19, 5 - 7 PM
Web Site


New Empire presents a recent series of paintings by German Tagle selected by Esperanza Leon, director and curator of SOLAR in East Hampton, New York. Tagle often uses toile fabrics as the support for compositions of explosive, gestural abstraction and surfaces constructed of thick, oozing layers of paint. The artist has gone on to use other tapestry fabrics for his paintings to great effect though he continues to utilize the iconic motifs of the toile that first inspired him, which serve as narrative elements to what is predominantly landscape painting, and inspire discussion on the baroque in colonial, modern, and post-modern art. Tagle (Chile, 1976) was included in the 2007 edition of The (S) Files/The Selected Files biennial at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and his most recent solo exhibition at Galería Moro, Santiago, Chile, Paraíso Artificial (Artificial Paradise), was accompanied by a full-colour, 40-page catalogue that includes essays by Elvis Fuentes, curator at El Museo, and Rocío Aranda Alvarado. He was most recently included in a group exhibition at SOLAR titled Torment(a), in 2008, and earlier this year had a solo exhibition and was included in a group show at Union Gallery, New York.

Rocio Aranda-Alvarado writes, With his new body of work, painter German Tagle seeks the long-awaited utopia, that object of desperate and violent searching that was pursued during the earliest periods of empire. His most recent works propose a new utopia, one that operates not on the history of aggressive hunting associated with kingdoms and their imagined destinies, but instead offers beauty. Tagle’s formidable realm offers unencumbered, exquisite nature, carefully nurtured by a little shepherd, a symbol of quiet loyalty, an anti-hero for a contemporary world.

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