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Gritli Faulhaber at Cherish

Soloshow «Fuck You, I love You», December 15, 2019 until January 18, 2020

Artists

Gritli Faulhaber

Institution

Cherish

Location

Geneva

Download

Press release (PDF)

Website

cherishhhh.ch

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Fuck You, I Love You! (I), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Assuming that there is a structure behind that surface, what would that be? The painted surface as the prototypical surface – displaying, representing – feeds on the illusion of completeness, a painting as a self-contained object. The works in the exhibition are an attempt to render such a structure visible – not by referring to the canvas itself, to its materiality, but by retelling the fairy tale of the painting’s internal logic (once upon a time), reweaving art historical narratives. All canvases of the series and pairs shown in «Fuck you, I love you» are subdivided, as in an exercise. By turning and tilting, motifs are sorted and arranged on the surface, which is not necessarily the border. The painted picture is a possibility, a selection made.

Dissolving the status of the individual painting, the canvases become strips of litmus – partly primed, partly not, partly abstract, partly figurative, partly recognizable as motifs; they are spatio-temporal constellations that mimic the iconographic meaning of the image as well as their potential to become a pattern. When motif structures the hierarchy of painting as pressed by the Académie royale (from high to low: history painting, portrait, genre painting, landscape, still life), then the pattern has, even worse, the smell of the decorative. But the salon painting is no more or less than the wallpaper; on the wallpaper it has been given a special place, at the same time it has to fit into the arrangement.

In these paintings, pictorial rules are set up as productive resistance in order to override the pictorial rules again - painting can become execution, execution of a program. The exercise underlying all paintings in the exhibition is simple – as if something fundamental had to be understood. If you mix all colors, you don’t get white, but gray, you said. That’s actually true, I thought, and that beautiful image from my physics lesson where the prism breaks white light into a rainbow bursted like a soap bubble. Which form is still allowed, which form do you allow yourself? The very moment when something seems forbidden to you, you reach a certain point where something could be revealed. You practice and work your way back to where you started – like writing your own name 30 times to make your signature look good. If the surfaces on the canvases are something like patches, then perhaps they are literally aids – to lift that which drives you, that which you’re ashamed of, that which is exhausting, the structure behind that first thought.

Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff

Gritli Faulhaber (*1990) studied at the Hochshule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, at Camberwell College of Arts in London and at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Zürich. She is one of the recipient of the Kiefer Hablitzel │Göhner Art Prize in 2017.

Gritli Faulhaber – FUCK YOU, I LOVE YOU!

The exhibition runs through January 18open on Saturdays and by appointment

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Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Bottles, 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; Threads of All Ages (I-III), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Compilation Painting (I), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Militant Joy (III), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Militant Joy (II), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Fuck You, I Love You! (II-IV), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Compilation Painting (II), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on Compilation Painting (II), (detail), 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish

Exhibition View Gritli Faulhaber Soloshow «Fuck You, I Love You!; view on The Feeling of Historical Unease, Mainstream Criticism, Loss of Sincerity, Abuse of Power or Just a Green Painting, 2019» at Cherish, Geneva, 2019 / Photo: James Bantone / Courtesy: the artist and Cherish