Screwed Up Screens

Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to present “Screwed Up Screens”, Tamara K.E.’s second solo show with the gallery. For the first time Johannes Vogt Gallery hosts an off-site exhibition in Los Angeles. Tamara K.E's presented body of work consists of oil sticks and paint on canvas or mylar. These works center their focus on the depiction of bunnies in cartoon form; brightly colored and bordering on abstraction. The graphic nature of K.E.'s line-work reifies its origins as drawings on the screens of androids, tablets and computers. She does not make the distinction between the practice of painting, using classical materials such as pigments and oil paint, and working with new consumer technologies. As a result, her images are in a constant flux between digital and analog, made and unmade. This notion mirrors the ambiguity of the exhibition’s title. While it may be taken as a series of screens which are screwed to the wall, mounted for potential use, its violent undertones suggest wonton destruction of the display device by, perhaps, the penetration of the screen by a screw itself. The bunnies appearing in K.E.'s work function for her as "bodies without organs"; full worlds of potentials underlying, but also infiltrating, organized reality. They become catalysts for their own distribution; images taking on certain memetic traits of biology. The bunnies thereby become a metaphor for their own technological inception, as catalysts for the network which carries them: self-perpetuating informational structures, constantly in flux. The bunnies’ sentiments are reiterated in the hang of the show. The majority of the works remain off the wall, unhung and thrusting into the space of the gallery. These shifts in depth are not to place the canvases in the context of histories of sculpture, but rather to destabilize the exhibition scenario and push the images into the contexts of networks. Tamara K.E. was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. She lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Kunstakademie in Duesseldorf, Germany. In 2003 K.E. represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale and participated in the 1st Prague Biennial. The artist has received a great number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany), the UBS Art Award for Young Art (Switzerland) and the European Prize for Painting (Belgium). She has exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Central House of Artists Moscow, CoBrA Museum Amsterdam, Haus Huth Daimler Contemporary Berlin, Van der Heydt Museum, Kunsthalle Hamburg. The first monograph on her work "none of us and somewhere else" (2007) was dedicated to her sociocritical approach via conceptual painting. In 2014 she was included in “100 Painters of Tomorrow”, published by Thames & Hudson.

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