The Familiar Object

Marlborough is thrilled to announce The Familiar Object, Anne Neukamp’s first solo exhibition in New York and with the gallery. 

Neukamp’s canvases examine a visual vocabulary of technical origin culled from the world around us. The punctuation marks, digital 3D models, and clip art that saturate public and private spaces serve as “found” images that undergo a series of methodical transformations by way of compositional process. 

Her interrogation of our shared pictorial language alters even the most well-defined referents. Envelope icons and hashtags are part of a compulsory visual lexicon, but realized through Neukamp’s lens, their forgone definitions and locations are subverted. The result sends any innate efficacy or associative properties adrift, and moves the act of comprehension toward the surreal. While motives between works are linked by a certain symbolic and psychological potential, anchored in the imagery of communication, the main associations remain abstract as each painting maintains its own logic. 

By superimposing disparate images and transforming them through repetition, mirroring, and rotation, the original context and significations are contorted, pushed ad absurdum. Additionally, a system of juxtaposing and interweaving oil, acrylic, and tempera paint, achieves a rich visual contrast, promoting perceptual shifts between poles of abstraction and figuration, material content and spatial imagination. This practice results in a total loss of hierarchy among the abstract and ornamental elements depicted, and lends a sense of fragments drifting in and out of consciousness. Like Magritte’s Les Objets Familier, ordinary objects become fetishized through apposition, forever changed into emblems that negate discrete interpretations. 

Anne Neukamp was born in Düsseldorf in 1976. She lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Ludlow38, NY, 2016; Gregor Podnar, Berlin, 2015; Greta Meert Gallery, Brussels, 2014; Valentin, Paris, 2014; Agustina Ferreyra, Puerto Rico, 2014; Kunstverein Oldenburg, Germany, 2013; and Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2012. Her works were also included in recent group shows at Neue Galerie Gladbeck, 2016; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 2014; Columbia University, New York, 2014; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2013; Kai10 Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, 2012; and the Prague Biennale in 2011.