The Colour and the Shape - Installation shot 08 - Caroline Kryzecki
The Colour and the Shape - Installation shot 06 - Dillwyn Smith
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Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to announce The Colour and the Shape, a group exhibition with works by Isabel Albrecht, James Brooks, Caroline Kryzecki, Karim Noureldin and Dillwyn Smith. Five artists, working with the stylistic means of reduction and abstraction, albeit in different ways and to different degrees. Narrowed to pure colour and pure form, it is the works transparency and simplicity that determines their intensity.

Caroline Kryzecki works with ballpoint pen on paper. Her compositions usually comprise of a minimum of two layers of identical or similar parallel line grids, set against one another at a flat angle. She uses four colours only: black, blue, green and red. The resulting sequences of coloured lines and shifted grids create the visual effect of moiré patterns as apparent in her works KSZ 50/35-47 (2015) or KSZ 100/70-11 (2014) both included in the show. The largest and most ambitious work KSZ 200/152– 07 (2015) is a calm composition of narrowly applied parallel lines. The young Berlin based artist is scheduled for a solo exhibition at the gallery in the near future.

Isabel Albrecht worked with a similar, nearly philosophical principle throughout her artistic life. She painted or drew lines in ink, graphite, paint or watercolour – freehand and varying in thickness, application and number. Adopting a reduced vocabulary of stylistic means, her works nevertheless follow clearly defined criteria within a pre-established system and are evidence of the artist’s fascination with numerology and structure, series, grids and repetition. Represented by the gallery since her graduation from the Royal Collage Isabel Albrecht has not shown at the gallery since her passing away in 2012. Having had her first institutional retrospective at Kunsthalle Lingen in Germany The Colour and the Shape is gladly Albrecht’s first return to the gallery, with a solo exhibition to follow in 2018.  

Dillwyn Smith has been fully dedicating himself to colour in its purest form. His new body of work, The Books (2017) are studies of watercolour on mould-made paper of different sizes. For the first time he introduces a sculptural element even if the colour still remains at the center of these space exploring colour sketch books. Smith’s working method is always immediate and an expression of his sensitivity towards the material. The coarse surface of the pages and the colour that fully infiltrates the single sheets causing the paper to curl are essential for the delicate feel. The luminance of the colours that contrast with each other reflect and change with the altering light conditions bringing the colours to life and expanding the artwork beyond itself.

James Brooks works with the means of abstraction in a very different way. His series on display, Organisation of Peers, Commons, & Gentry (2017) appropriates signage, diagrams, packaging, and information from a variety of historic and contemporary visual sources that represent social structures and logical organisation within the urban world. The small format works of A4 and A6 sizes turn these data into structural formations of information while de-contextualising them from their original source and functionality. The visual result is very discreet; simplified compositions in gouache and pencil on watercolour paper.

The Colour and the Shape is probably most applicable to Karim Noureldin’s work. Known for his colourful and geometric patterns inspired by early mark making, his works on paper are exactly that: the condensed interplay of colour and shape. Drawn by hand, his crayoned stripes and amorphous structures but also the colour intense designs of geometrical shapes that fill entire sheets are of organic nature. Included in the exhibition are works from his older series entitled Evo as well as drawings from his latest series entitled Play. Noureldin’s work has become well established in Switzerland and Germany and is included in many public European collections. He is also well known for his collaborations with several major architecture firms.