Paul Dacey, Fré Ilgen, Richard Purdy

The Form of the Formless

May 4th to June 30th, 2002.

Wall works by Paul Dacey and sculptures by Fré Ilgen and Richard Purdy.

Introduction and conversation with the artists:  Gudrun Thiessen-Schneider, Lecture by Professor Michael Bette:  "Questions to a New Ornamentation"

Simulations of movement, gravity, and multi-layered time-space microstructures are areas of major concern for the artists.  They believe that nothing exists by itself, and that everything is interrelated through complex interactions with each other.

Paul Dacey (born 1960, USA) painted discs and records on the walls for his part of the exhibition.  The motifs in the painted images are varying of concepts and references (flags, emblems, glass marbles, etc.).  However, the individual pieces are always elements of a larger context that Dacey makes visible with the help of drawings done directly on the wall.  This, in turn, follows systems that underlie the motifs.  Dacey completed the works "Six Degrees of Separation," "Solitaire," "Double Hex," and "Manifesto."

Fré Ilgen (born 1956, the Netherlands) also works on complex simulations of color-form movements and time-space connections.  Her creation for the Kunstverein, a wall sculpture entitled "Ssssh" (steel, wire, wood, acrylic paint), appears to float in front of the lime green wall.  Another piece, "My Sacrifice," a seemingly weightless sculpture with no mount, hung in blue colors from the ceiling of the room.

Richard Purdy (born 1956, USA) created a structure of monumental scale, composed of many small shapes.  His mural "Gauge Field" (latex paint, chalk, industrial ink, hand-cut stamps of Spirograph shapes) resembled frozen moments from the infinite processing of both macro and micro nature.  The work also interacts with the space and resonates with the subject of the randomness of highly specialized structures.

Sponsored by the city of Neuenhaus and the state of Lower Saxony.