FRANKFURT.- Galerie Parisa Kind is presenting a solo exhibition by the artist Isabelle Fein entitled "Show (or hide)".
On display are eighteen new paintings and drawings with ink and oil paint as well as a selected series of glazed ceramics. In the exhibition, Fein's works and motifs, which can be particularly well understood in the context of the other works, form a universal cosmos.
We are looking at a proud looking chicken. While its feet stalk through the lush green of the lawn, the bright yellow sun stands above it. Then, quite casually, several gestural brushstrokes in radical blue overlay the scene. They break with the illusionism of the fictional imagery and make one thing clear: real is only the image surface, what we believe to be images are projections of our own imagination. The picture title also twists the perspective. "Towards the Sun" ("Der Sonne entgegen", 2019) does not focus on the perfectly drawn animal, as we might initially believe, but on us, the observers, who are winking at the painted sun as a present counterpart.
Isabelle Fein works with ink. "I imagine painting is like surfing," she says. "You plunge into it and trust in your experiences." Like waves on the sandy beach, their highly pigmented colors draw into the softly woven cotton fabric and combine to form contrasts of light and dark. With colorful striped and checkered patterns ranging from one edge of the image to the other, we refer to the specific flatness of the pictures. Drawings and an illustrious group of animals and plants find their place in the tautness and liven up the abstract world. Wherever graphic patterns and figurative motifs meet, one becomes aware of the formal imagery: the rigidity of geometry is broken by the gesture of drawing. Conversely, the media's vigilance is also evident in Fein's series of ceramics, with which she cleverly expands the two dimensional painting and transports the small-format figures into the room.
Isabelle Fein's works show a seductive world. But behind this supposedly beautiful language hides a subtle image survey.
"How do we want to live? How do we want to shape our lives?" says Fein. Her works open space for possibilities. They show wishes and make visible what moves us emotionally, what we want to experience and experience on our own body. The
questions are also reflected in the depicted figures, who are always completely with them, as if they were living in their
own realm, isolated from the outside world. There are the two cyclists in "Let's go" (2019), who rush by quickly, or the three strollers in "Heart and Lungs" (2019), who are immersed in conversation, stroll down the city street. But then, every now and then, there is the skeptical view of some characters, as in the painting "Untitled (bird)" (2019) or the ceramics "Untitled
(Cup)" (2019), which focuses us challenging as he wanted to critically review how we behave as observers to the motives. It
is just the breaks and secrets that make jumps from one work to the next that make Feins' exhibition a journey through our own world of thought.
Isabelle Fein (* 1973 in Wiesbaden, lives and works in Berlin) studied at the HfG in Offenbach with Prof. Heiner Blum and completed a two-year guest study at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with Prof. Michael Krebber. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery and the Jack Hanley Gallery, both in New York, and participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, and the Kindl in Berlin. This year she will present a group of works in the exhibition "Paint so known as blood" at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. As part of "Friend of a Friend Warsaw", Galerie Parisa Kind will soon show a selection of Fein's works in the Galeria Pola Magnetyczne. Fein was repeatedly artist-in-residence of the CCA Andratx in Mallorca. "Show (or hide)" is the artist's fifth solo show at Parisa Kind.
