Peter Feiler | Sebastian Gögel | Ragnar Kjartansson | Ricardo Lanzarini | Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir | Gabriel Acevedo Velarde

Galerie Adler welcomes you to creep into the dark imaginary worlds of Peter Feiler, Sebastian Gögel, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ricardo Lanzarini, Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir and Gabriel Acevedo Velarde. The group exhibition Face Up will include curiously tense figurative drawings in different mediums and an animation.

Face Up features the dark twisting universes and characters created by each artist. Somehow the pieces have a strange replication to our own world with the ideologies of self-centered beings, like in Sebastian Gögel’s work, to the provocative self-destructing figures in Peter Feiler’s drawings. On the other hand, Ragnar Kjartansson displays the human figure in a delicate yet grotesque manner.

Ricardo Lanzarini’s ink drawings are composed of crowds of tiny figures: frantic little men dressed in extravagant attire swarm around the white page like a colony of industrious insects. Upon slinking into the nightmarish scenes in the gallery space, one might also find a lighter and playful side to the pieces. With Sigga Sigurdardottir’s drawings of ambiguously disturbing characters there still lingers some sort of childish charm and humor to them by the mischievous palette the artist chose that mimics the comic world. Last but not least Gabriel Acevedo Velarde’s animation video is refreshingly different. Acevedo’s distinctive figures tell the artist’s own parables of society and the human condition.

Though there are many different languages of drawing within the show through each artist, there is a direct and interesting dialogue that happens between the pieces. The exhibition is reminiscent of today’s world reflected in a contradictory, grim, and brutal mirror. A couple of questions arise: is this truly that far off from our own reality? Or, perhaps, is this exhibition just a display of a humorously dark fantasy?