January 23 - February 28, 2009
Schalter is pleased to announce an exhibition by Joy Beecroft. The exhibition will present a series of new paintings by Berlin-based, British artist Joy Beecroft, completed for presentation at Schalter. This is the first solo presentation of Beecroft's work in Berlin.
Beecroft's new series of paintings has developed out of a rejection of everything she had accepted or understood as correct about how to make an image. In her own words, 'I had to find a way to make something rather than a picture of something'. Often taking a simple starting point, like a boot or hand noticed on the U-Bahn, her subject can be seen as a host able to assume a series of roles and missteps, leading to a culmination point where ultimately a character is elicited from the act of making. Painting becomes a process of starting out wrong and winning something from the losing side.
At the center of her exhibition at Schalter are paintings which develop out of the form of the Blackjack Oak leaf. The image was selected from an encyclopaedia of wildlife and nature in North America. Beecroft's paintings are laid bare, offering their failures and embarrassments up to the light. They are touched and touchable improvisations, constructed out of a series of slippages and mistakes, where lumps of oil are moulded and allowed to come forward, but then falter and disappear back into the gesso ground, questioning the desire for a payoff by appearing as refutations of resolution and immediacy.
Joy Beecroft was born in Yorkshire, England, and moved to Berlin in 2004, after completing her B.A. at Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work has previously been shown in the UK and Germany.
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