Tashi Brauen: Bending Forms

PRESS RELEASE

May 4, 2017 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Text by Christi Dufour

Bending Forms Exhibition by Swiss Artist Tashi Brauen to Open 

Friday, May 19 at Ronewa Art Gallery, Berlin 

Ronewa Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of prints and installations by young contemporary Swiss artist Tashi Brauen. The showing of some dozen works by the artist, known for his manipulations of humble paper to create formalist and intriguing sculptural forms both on and off the wall, includes two new site-specific installations created especially for Ronewa’s Berlin gallery. The Zurich-based artist spent a week on location creating museum-scale wall pieces that are boldly painted in highly saturated primary colors with enamel paint on paper respectively. Titled Reliefs Nos. 3 and 4, these works command their spaces and envelop the viewer's field of vision. Creases and folds of the expertly shaped and hung works combine with light and shadow to create animated surfaces and contours as the artist’s use of paper becomes highly sculptural and monumental.

In addition to these site-specific works, Brauen's Figurations are included in the exhibit. These mid-sized to more intimate works take their inspiration from the artist's painted paper constructions and are no less imposing. Printed on archival Hahnemuhle Baryta paper in limited editions of five, the images are created through the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, editing and reconfiguration with a software interface. His source material is painted and folded. The artist creates strong and elegant forms against stark and mysterious black backgrounds. Newly formalized shapes appear to float, fly or even “dance” as the artist himself states.

An important element in Brauen’s prints and paintings is his concern and insistence on remaining true to the nature of his media. "Texture is very important for me, the texture of the paper, that you can feel it somehow. That you see the texture and even in the color, that the color is not overly corrected so much that it looks unreal somehow. So,it is important for me to show the object itself as paper and that you can even see the scratches on it. The connection to the reality is important to me." The artist's steadfast concern for the paper’s texture and the colors he chooses to paint them are something he specifically retains in his digitally printed works. In these highly contemporary prints that owe a debt to the Minimalists of a bygone era and that are important in their relevance, Brauen has created images with a focus on both the traditional physical act of painting and a fusion with technical and photographic expertise. The artist's concern with materiality is still there in the final image, even as the source material is handsomely transformed. 

Tashi Brauen was born in 1980 and continues to live and work in Zurich. His artwork has been shown in galleries and museums in Switzerland, France, Bangkok, Shanghai and the United States, including the Art Museum Bern, Fabrique culture Hégenheim/F, Stadtgalerie Bern, Centre Pasquart Biel, Museum Bärengasse Zürich, and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. He is also co-founder with curator Angelo Romano of Counter Space, in Zurich, an independent exhibition and project space with the mission to present work that explores the use of temporary and process-based methods of art making with an emphasis on experimentation and contemporary discourse.

Text by Christi Dufour