Charlotte Schleiffert / Zachary Wollard

CHARLOTTE SCHLEIFFERT / ZACHARY WOLLARD

For the first time we will be showing monumental drawings and paintings by Charlotte Schleiffert (Rotterdam) and Zachary Wollard (Brooklyn) at Open Art. Current or historical events are reference points for both artists. Imaginary scenarios, citations from contemporary culture, politics, pop, and poetry meld here into imaginative descriptions of the world.

Charlotte Schleiffert’s protagonists are a mixture of imaginary figures from big city streets, television, magazine photos, newspapers, and books. ”Motorbikers” (2005), a drawing installation, refers to the New Yorker hip-hop scene, with its contradictions between rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, men and women, weak and strong. The opportunity for blacks to use rap music to escape from the difficult life in the ghetto, to have careers, is usually sold with intensified sexist role-playing. Pimping and the glorification of violence, sex, and drugs dominate the scene. Schleiffert is inspired by the hip-hop lifestyle; she plays with, and at the same time breaks open its glamour. The drawings are combined with writings describing the disadvantages of success and the yearnings of the gangs and girls.

Large colorful drawings are glued onto fabric or delicate rice paper, forming a kind of tapestry. The ornamental motifs come from Asian fashion or transport the atmosphere of a dance club on Cuba. Schleiffert journeys far and wide to test for herself the authenticity of the images of the world transmitted by mass media. ”I might see a thousand images,” she says, ”but something has to touch me before I can make a picture of it.”

”In grote delen...(In Many Parts of the World the Lights Remain Switched Off,” 2005) is a large assemblage of drawings referring to the political situation in different parts of the world. Schleiffert combines images of women in Pakistan and Somalia, scenes from prisons in Afghanistan, newspaper quotes, and abstract motifs. Glamour, violence, seduction, and destruction are turned into an explosive mix.

Charlotte Schleiffert (b. 1967 in Tilburg, Netherlands) lives and works today in Rotterdam and Xiamen (China). In 1999 she received the Prix de Rome Award for Painting. In 2004 the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam honored her with a solo show and catalogue, and she was nominated for the Premio di Golfo Award at the Biennale Europea Arti Visive in La Spezia, Italy. Group shows, 2004/05: Secrets of the ‘90s, Selections from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem; Netherlands; Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany.

Zachary Wollard’s paintings, ”Fools of God” and ”Verlaine’s Last Stand” refer to historical events and figures. When a Pan Am airplane crashed into the ocean near Long Island years ago, one of the most expensive FBI investigations of all time began. The airplane was reconstructed out of its scattered pieces. Wollard painted the work of rebuilding the Pan Am machine after a photograph. Guanjin figures—Buddhist goddesses of compassion and serenity—and a goat’s head crowned with flowers frame the body of the airplane, which is dissolved into splinters of color. Abrupt changes in proportion, patterns, surfaces, style, and composition, as well as the contrast between florescent and naturalistic paint make up the charm of this painting.

Wollard comes to painting from literature. Mental journeys inspire his visual themes. ”Verlaine’s Last Stand” is painted after a photograph of Verlaine, which shows him sitting in his workroom surrounded by an imaginary space whose colors and shapes refer to the poet’s hallucinatory state of mind. Wollard’s paintings employ the classic rules of perspective; their color modulation and precision recall Renaissance paintings, but also take the liberty of breaking up surfaces in a surrealist manner.

Of Zachary Wollard’s paintings, Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, ” Mr. Wollard’s paint handling encompasses in a way that keeps things lively. His main feat is to organize his fragmented picture parts into something resembling, but not quite submitting to a unified whole.”

Zachary Wollard (b. 1974, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA) lives in Brooklyn, New York. In the summer of 2004, he was artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. His work has been featured in group shows since 1999 in New York, Tokyo, Chicago, and Madrid. Wollard’s publications are The Eagle Has Landed, 7 Poems Accompany Paintings by Zachary Wollard (artist book, edition of 26: A-Z, 2004); and Zachary Wollard, A Place to Shin, Collaborations with John Coletti (New York, 2001).

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Charlotte Schleiffert / Zachary Wollard