For his first solo show in New York, German artist Bendix Harms has created a high-spirited body of large-scale paintings, full of enjoyment, anticipation, and melancholy.

Straightforwardly enough, the show is centered around a painting of a bearded man’s face - sensual lips, eyes of gentle sadness - with the show’s title “Solid As A Rock” inscribed on his fluffy white beard. The painting does, in fact, set up all motifs, moods and important life-questions of Harms’ work: love, grief, yearning, and a pointed zest for life. The brushstroke is loose and coarse, the oil paint applied in broad, swift movements, the palette reduced to blues and blacks accentuated with white over-paint. Words are integrated into the composition—all with a decisive disinterest in verisimilitude in favor of spirited emotional communication.

Harms’s paintings depict moments of emotional attention, a man mourning over a dead bird, two owls cuddling in the night sky, a man and his dog gazing at an aircraft that flies into the setting sun. With heart-felt care and thought, Harms creates a provocatively trusting view of the world and of human nature.

Harms lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. His work has been shown in the recent Prague Biennial (2005) and the first Tirana Biennale (2001). In the fall of 2004, he made his New York debut when John Bock invited him to exhibit a group of paintings alongside his own work at Anton Kern Gallery.