Dave McKean 'Death (From The Particle Tarot)', 2000, digital photograph from The Particle Tarot: The Major Arcana, editions of 20, 24” x 24” or 12” x 12” / courtesy MERRY KARNOWSKY GALLERY
Andrea Offermann and Tom Felber for ceative face Magazine
With Merry Karnowsky Gallery another successful gallery from L.A. stepped across the ocean and opened a new gallery in Berlin. Founded in 1997, Merry Karnowsky Gallery has quickly become one of the hot spot galleries in L.A. Focusing on 'low-brow', street and graffiti art, Karnowsky showed significant artists of the emerging underground movement from the beginning, among them Mark Ryden, Camille Rose Garcia, Todd Schorr and Shepard Fairey. Focusing on that specific part of L.A. art, Merry Karnowsky Gallery decided to offer more international exposure to its' artists and identified the German capital as the ideal place for a second location. Jessica O'Dowd, curator at MK Gallery LA, points out that opening in London would have been the obvious choice, whereas opening in Berlin was a more forward thinking move. This month Merry Karnowsky is showing Dave McKean Persistence of Vision in L.A. (until August 16) and Miss Van and Victor Castillo Canto Negro y Brujerias in Berlin (until August 21).
Dave McKean, well-known illustrator, artist and filmmaker, has been showing with Merry Karnowsky Gallery since its start in 1999. One of those artists who do anything and everything that interests them, he might not be considered a fine artist by some, but a true renaissance man by those who still believe that an artist should show interest and express himself in all media. In his new show Persistence of Vision Dave McKean returns to the influences of his childhood, basing the major part of his paintings on old silent horror movies like Murnau's 'Nosferatu'(1927) and Fritz Lang's 'Der Müde Tod'. McKean says that he was fascinated by the visuals of those films that were never quite clear, often grainy and almost abstract, but that this was exactly what built that scary atmosphere which modern horror movies cannot quite capture anymore. In these paintings he wanted to capture the atmosphere these films evoked in him as a child.
But that is not the only theme in his show. Each room focuses on a different part of life and death, the first room, with vivid pen and ink drawings of couples dancing, shows first encounters. The second room with the above mentioned paintings focuses on childhood impressions. The third room, showing digital work and sculptural pieces threaded on strings across the room, closes in on disturbing fantastic nightmares. McKean points out that storytelling always plays a big part in his work and dictates the medium he will use to tell that story. Thus, shifting from filmmaking, which is now his major focus, to illustration or gallery work and back, only seems natural.
In their exhibition Canto Negro y Brujerias, Miss Van (France) & Victor Castillo (Chile) unfold their unique but harmonious iconographies in a pictorial exercise of intersecting ideas. These artists approach subjects like; seduction, desire, enchantment, and the game of infantile cruelty from their personal perspectives. The title of the exhibition attempts to unite these proposals and at the same time, alludes to Spanish culture, superstition and witchcraft as basic context, with dark invocations of common ghosts.
The 'Poupees' of Miss Van, always surrounded in sensational atmospheres, embody the surrounding energies of the loving spell that they seduce and catch. All are portrayed in mystical scenarios, between meditation and liberation of evil, introspection and exorcism. Through their closed eyes, we enter into the private worlds of each, reflecting on their dark side and feminine fragility.
Victor Castillo shows us a mixture of classic and comic painting loaded with infantile personages of subjects: macabre, joy, seduction and the unscrupulous pleasures of the destruction game. At the same time he also makes references to contemporary realities and a new generation's stimulations from the constant bombardment of today's media.
