Zürcher Studio is delighted to announce Esther Tielemans’ first solo show in New York.

Esther Tielemans has expanded the very concept of landscape painting, making paintings on wood panels that culminate in installations of monumental scale (such as the one she created at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum at the invitation of Lily van der Stokker). Wilma Süto makes the following remark about Tielemans’ work: “Painting as a medium has gradually evolved into a screen of reflections…We sway along in an amazing pendulum-like movement on both sides of the surface of the water and the horizon, nature and culture, figurative and abstract, fake and real.”1 Esther Tielemans alludes to the imposing landscapes of North America (the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, for example), where the stainless “beauty” of nature can induce a disturbing state of solitude. The painting becomes a panorama, a skyline. Groups of glossy colored panels appear to float in front of the wall. Some of the wood panels on which the paintings are made attain the dimensions of walls arranged in space on a human scale. The nexus with nature and the outer world is inverted in the conception of inner space, and hints contained within the works help to explain this phenomenon. At the start of the present decade, a number of Tielemans’ paintings were materially incorporated into installations that also included diverse objects. They gradually became “object-paintings” on the frontier of “design,” and the represented space no longer possessed anything more than a distant connection to the reality of a landscape. At present Esther Tielemans’ paintings, whatever their size, are wholly shorn of scale. They seem, in fact, to float in weightlessness. Here is a theatrical experience—the exact reflection of a mental space whose deployment is only just beginning. —Bernard Zürcher

1 Wilma Süto, Skylines, Carla Klein, Antonietta Peeters and Esther Tielemans (January 20 – April 6, 2008). Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (Nederland)

Zürcher Studio will also introduce the work of Eun Jim Kim in its project room. The exhibition will include glazed stoneware sculptures and works on paper.

Jin’s work stems from her interest in Buddhist philosophy and the interplay between fantasy and the sublime. Born and raised in Korea, and a recent graduate of New York University’s Master’s in Fine Arts program, Jin is developing a visual language that melds traditional decorative and utilitarian arts with the realms of the bizarre and the surreal. Jin is interested in the meditative practice of art making, and engages in an unplanned path toward the completion of an artwork. As such, the works have an earnest and whimsical quality to them. While the sculptures, such as a pair of breasts melting into disembodied heads, tend to take on distorted or contorted bodily qualities, the large-scale drawings contain intricately patterned surfaces with tiny representational surprises. They are deeply engrossing images—imbued with an energy that belies the soothing black depths of the paper’s surface. Jin is interested in the practice of automatism, or the performance of actions without conscious thought or attention, and as such, her work is both beautiful and crude.

For this exhibition, the pairing of drawings and sculpture and the organic with the inventive, provides an animated entrée into a rich body of work by a promising young artist. —Jenna Komarin