UNION Gallery is pleased to present REPRIMER, a solo show by Rainer Neumeier. This is the first exhibition of Neumeier’s works in the UK and, via a selection of his recent works, serves as an introduction of his unique pictorial style and practise to the British scene.
In the latter half of the 1940s, a new dawn in painting was thrust upon the art world with the birth of the abstract expressionist movement. Seminal artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko re-mapped the painted pictorial surface, reducing painting to its fundamentals of applying paint to canvas, bringing forth a new paradigm in the medium and a challenge for artists thereafter to further investigate the possibilities of paint.
Neumeier has taken up this challenge generating his peculiar pictorial style available to be observed on the walls of UNION gallery. Layering the paint up to 60 times on the canvas in a process that can take up to four years, the work is cloaked in its own history. From this history, Neumeier weaves a narrative and sets off on the task of unveiling the painting’s concealed past, removing layers and revealing the works previous incarnations. The paint chips created from this process are then macerated and used to create new works.
Neumeier’s work sits on the boundary between painting, sculpture and performance. The artist leaves his mark on the work but is in a constant discourse with the surface’s former self. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity for the viewer to unravel the story of a work’s creation and its previous incarnations. REPRIMER establishes a new way of thinking about painting and constitutes an overdue reinvestigation into the medium, creating a new manner of thinking about paint, in reaction to the obsession of looking back to the past.