Kendell Geers - Stealing Fire From Heaven

Kendell Geers' exhibition opening is postponed.

"No sooner had I landed in Istanbul than I found myself on the front lines of the barricades, partly out of the curiosity of an artist and partly out of need as an old Anti-Apartheid activist who refuses to give up on trying to make the world a better place for future generations. I still believe that art will change the world!

'Stealing Fire from Heaven' is a meditation upon violence and poetry, the struggle between creation and destruction, the fragile balance between flesh and spirit. The clean utopian modernist lines of Mondrian, Stella and Lewitt are pinned down by the razorblades of security fencing and border lines. We gaze through the barbs and blades of rational engineered control spaces into the disorder and chaos of freedom and imagination. Art is all that liberates us from a world dislocated by ideologies, people separated by language and culture, faith ripped to shreds by fear and spirit torn from flesh.

I dedicate my exhibition to the streets of Istanbul, to the people protesting for a better future and to the trees and plants of a tiny park begging to be saved as living monuments and reminders of the inter-connectedness of life and spirit. I dedicate my exhibition to every-body that still believes and will never abandon hope."

Kendell Geers

Galerist is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Kendell Geers in Istanbul from June 4th to July 6th, 2013. The exhibition titled ‘Stealing Fire From Heaven’ will include most recent paintings of the South African-born, Belgium-based artist along with works on paper and examples of historical sculptures. Created specifically for this city, the exhibition is the artist’s personal spiritual call to arms, a political-erotical-mystical meditation in paint upon Bruce Nauman’s declaration that “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

Influenced by the first clause of Sol Lewitt’s manifesto, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusion that logic cannot reach,” Geers uses a Sol LeWitt wall drawing as a starting point for this series of paintings and drawings composed of outlines of Razormesh fence on canvas. The works transform the violence of a world divided by boarders and marked by fear into the symbolic world of spirit. The violence of cold steel gives way to a totemic emblem, charged with consciousness that holds creation and destruction, order and chaos, in a fragile contradictory balance. The paintings and drawings are portals through which spirit has been materialised and matter spiritualised.

The Razormesh or Razorwire fence, originally developed and patented in Apartheid South Africa has, since the artist’s childhood years, developed into an international presence, a silent sentinel marking every border and limits of the socio-political space. From the Eurostar platform at Gare du Nord in Paris to the gated communities of wealthy suburban mansions, from international political flashpoints and borders to airports, schools, prisons and hospitals, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, the razorwire fence has become an archetypal symbol of the present global condition...

Kendell Geers
Stealing Fire From Heaven