Emerging contemporary artists - selected so you don't have to...

Gregor Gleiwitz

Practice: painting

Click image to start slideshow of this artist's work ?

Despite appearances, the work of Berlin-based Polish painter Gregor Gleiwitz is far from abstract in conception. Portraits, figures and landscapes often provide a starting point for his work, and just as frequently remain embedded - albeit numinously - within the final result. (The 2011 black ink on canvas featured in our slideshow provides a good example - observed closely and carefully, it begins to take on distinctive elements of a human profile).

This said, Gleiwitz's concern with evocative, rather than mimetic, form plays a far more obvious role in his painting and is tackled via a multiplicity of propositions.

Palettes range from chromatic abundance to muted, grey-flooded tones. Canvases differ considerably in size, and highly detailed paintings are accompanied by looser, more economic production (in all cases, however, Gleiwitz's apparently effortless handling of complex layering is superlative).

Perhaps inevitably, certain stylistic overlaps with established names periodically occur - Varda Caivano, in particular, occasionally springs to mind - but the studied non-linearity of Gleiwitz's body of work precludes overly glib comparison.

The arena of contemporary abstraction may be crowded, but Gleiwitz looks set to claim his own authoritative space within it.

Added March 2012

Artist's statement:

I find forms by means of painting. The images elude the recognitiory models of the beholder. My art is neither abstract nor figurative but a portrayal of the world whereby we as onlooker, must seek out a new vocabulary to respond to what is being viewed. The act of viewing these works is in perpetual flux: even as the genesis and process of painting is demonstrated for us, we are induced to keep on questioning the integrity of our relation to the image.