In their third collaboration up to date Pablo’s Birthday (New York), Galerie TZR (Düsseldorf) and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London) are delighted to present the exhibition “Deconstructing Space”. Three prominent artistic positions, Ina Geißler, Stefan Mauck and Alan Uglow, were chosen to present three different approaches of how to define space by dissecting it into various components, plying with its actual meaning and reducing it to its essential patterns.

Ina Geißler’s spatial compositions explore the boundaries between the perception of space and its abstraction. The artist’s work moves between an allusion to existing places and their negation. Geißler builds her canvases like an architect revealing a tendency to become more abstract in her recent paintings. In her painting series “Fallen” and “Einsicht” strips of tape serve as framework during the creation process. Geißler uses them to confine the surfaces painted in muted egg tempera and reveal the layers beneath after they have been removed. The contrast between complex architectural spaces and sensual painting demonstrate the particular appeal of the painter’s oeuvre. Essentially abstract, Geißler’ s canvases are nevertheless earthed.

Geißler creates a spatial cosmos that connects her imagery to the structures of urban landscapes but at the same time serves as a pictorial filter for the digital age. Born in Hamburg in 1970, Ina Geißler studied painting at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. She has exhibited widely in Germany and and had a solo exhibiton in New York in 2006. Geißler lives and works in Berlin, her work is part of several high profile private collections.

At first glance Stefan Mauck’s house models seem to be figurative relief objects rather than works that aim at dissecting space. Compared to the other two artists in “Deconstructing Space” his works are much more rooted in a social context, in particular that of German suburbia. Lately Mauck chooses purely functional places in the public space devoid of a social context like in the most recent wood model “RC”, a transformator building. These works become charged with social meaning by the graffiti that is placed on them. By rebuilding some of the inhabitant’s homes and their environments, Mauck analyzes and disassembles their lives but ultimately also their space.

Mauck does not make an obvious statement about space as such but rather provokes a reinterpretation of space by producing spatial illusions and transcending the idea of space through the garaffitis. An individually created pictorial concept of space is placed against an architectutal spatial concept that is functional and impersonal.

Mauck was born in Stade near Hamburg in 1973 and studied at Hochschule der bildenden Künste in Braunschweig. He has exhibited widely in Germany and Europe and won several high profile prizes and scholarships including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium and the price for fine arts at the Spengel Museum, Hannover. In 2007 he won the most prestigious German scholarship, the Villa Massimo Stipendium in Rome.

The most extreme approach to space and its deconstruction or rather reduction can be found in the panels of Alan Uglow. His paintings have a uniform nature and capture the essence of what space is about: the boundaries and the space within those boundaries. Since the 1970’s Uglow’s paintings are composed of monochrome rectangular fields edged and bisected by stripes of contrasting colours. Uglow’s geometrical approach to painting is minimal but also has a highly individual twist. His relation to concrete places is obvious through the choice of titles in two of his most famous series: The Stadium Series and the World Hotel Series linking his elegantly proportioned abstractions to the spatial structures of a football stadium or a hotel. His latest work “…”, evokes a highly seductive yet spiritually charged ambience generated by the minimal means of a white space framed by two vertical and horizontal bands of silver acrylics.

Alan Uglow was born in Luton, England in 1941 and lives and works in New York since 1969. He had numerous solo exhibitions across Europe and North America with participations at museum exhibitions at Cebntre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1998), Gemeentemuseum The Hague (2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn 2004 and P.S.1, New York (2006).