ALPTRAUM (Nightmare)

January 15, 2020 In news By De Anda

It’s my honor to have my work Mal Ojo/ Mala Mano (Evil Eye/ Bad Hand), on display at the Torrrance Art Museum as a part of the extravaganza wandering exhibition Alptraum (Nightmare)! Big thanks to creator Marcus Sendlinger, co-curator Max Presneill, the incredible TAM team, and to La Esacion Arte Contemporaneo, Chihuhua Mexico where I joined this project. Congratulations to all the other fantastic participating artists!

Also check out at TAM Death Cult: Skulls. Motorcycles. A Moment of Impact. Both shows on view until March 14.

http://www.torranceartmuseum.com

ABOUT Alptraum: The title of the wandering exhibition was inspired by the paintings of the Swiss artist Johann- Heinrich Füssli (1741 Zurich – 1825 London) who painted different versions of “Incubus“ (Nachtmahr). He made the world of dreams and visions subject of his paintings inspired by ghost stories.

The artists invited to contribute to this exhibition have been asked only to submit a work which has their direct hand in it, so physical contact and mark making on the surface of the material is implied in a manner, within this context, akin to the skrier, an ‘automatic writer’, a pyromancer’s stirring of the hot embers, an ectoplasmic medium – the hand that re-creates the subconscious wanderings of its owner. This naturally excludes many types of process, but rather than excluding artists because their process prevents them from physical contact with their final piece, the artists invited to contribute have simply been asked to experiment within the pre-equisits of the theme. This offers them the opportunity to break the mould of their practice and try something slightly new, or indeed, old but discarded. Like George Orwell’s Room 101, in his predictive tale, ‘1984’, we all have our own version of what constitutes a nightmare, and for this reason, the project has been opened to a large number of artists whose many and varied personal nightmare versions, or visions, act to reflect this hugely variable human state of fears and fobias, pain and panic.

Alptraum, the German of Nightmare, is an artist led project. It is a model which utilizes global communication between localized artist hubs and clusters to form an international grouping with the intent of opening a dialogue about this subject across borders and cultures in order to delve into the stuff and mind murk that is collectively shared or completely random and unrelated, or individual specific within the syndrome of ‘The Nightmare’. Each artist draws on their own personal experience in order to visualize those anxieties which take them beyond everyday dreams. Working within the remit of the ‘artist curated project’, all of the works in Alptraum have been restricted in size and material in order to facilitate the low cost postal transportation of the show from country to country, with each exhibition site taking responsibility to pass the show on to the next host – the number of works and artists may change or grow, and the approach to interpreting and hanging the show vary from space to space as the body of work meanders on from country to country, like a trans- global nimbostratus formation; Alptraum is the exhibition equivalent of Stephen Kings ‘The Fog’.

Artists participating in this project include:

ALPTRAUM (Nightmare)

ALPTRAUM (Nightmare)

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