Hooper Turner mise en scène

frosch&portmann is pleased to start the new season with „Hooper Turner mise en scène“, the artists’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Hooper Turner loves advertising – and he hates it. This love-hate-relationship is the source of his work; the artist’s fascination for certain commercial images stimulates him to paint them, re-making them. It’s a time consuming process, hours of just looking at the advertisement, exploring new details and memorizing the picture. The finished paintings reflect the catalog or other ephemeral printed images enlarged and astonishingly “real”. Turner prefers what already exists to the invention of new imagery; he paints through mimesis, framing rather than creating. The meticulous re-creation of a found image from the mass media into a larger, precious and unique work of art could be interpreted as the transformation form a “low culture object” into a “high culture object” – whereas, in doing so, the artist demonstrates great respect for the source material.

Hooper Turner’s new work references still lifes in various catalogs; we recognize recurring elements such as candles, skulls and memento mori-like arrangements. The single object paintings are much more materially present than the original print ads; the painted doorknob, bone china or animal appears in life size, which adds to the almost touchable realness of the two-dimensional work. The image of the object becomes the object. The transformation of living things and objects into their representation in another material is an important theme in Turner’s oeuvre. New to the artist’s vocabulary are the scenes of women positioned in front of a mirror. Seemingly absorbed in themselves, they touch up their makeup, arrange their hair or simply admire their beauty — they are getting ready to go on stage. Are these beauties from the past or present? As to their times, the images are vague, amalgamations of different periods. In these rather unrealistic settings, objects and people from varied places and slightly different times are put in the scene to create a representation of an ideal world — a staged world as shown in glossy magazines.

Born in Charlotte, NC, Hooper Turner lives and works in New York. He received his B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and his M.F.A. from the University of Georgia at Athens.

September 7 – October 30, 2010 Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, noon – 6pm