8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Shibuya Hikarie 8F
April 6 – 24, 2017
Venue hours : 11am – 8pm
Open everyday during exhibitions
Free Admission

Opening reception: April 6, 2017 6pm-8pm

http://www.hikarie8.com/artgallery/2017/04/german-stegmaier.shtml

Artist German Stegmaier creates drawings that embrace four-dimensional spaces and paintings of simply layered and nuanced colors. It usually takes a numbers of years for a drawing to be completed; a charged yet serene space emerges from numerous lines of short strokes, stretched around the erased lines of pencil or charcoal. Lines continuing sometimes even for 20 years convey the feeling of creating fragments of history. The Director of Winterthur Museum, Konrad Bitterli remarks on Stegmaier’s drawings as follows: “Beyond all references and tradition in art history, Stegmaier’s drawings are first and foremost ‘objects for seeing’. Unlike the champions of Modernism, he is not interested in a visual equivalent to an artistic theory, let alone a social utopia; he has apparently arbitrarily made use since the 1990s of a broad array of formal possibilities and artistic traditions.” (“GERMAN STEGMAIER”, catalogue published by Galerie ZINK and Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2013)
This exhibition features 24 drawings. Stegmaier remarks of his own work: “It has to reach a state where I cannot add anything else, remove or alter it; when it is a thing, a painting. The material must be transformed to such an extent that the painting or drawing also functions without me. It has become independent and more different, in the best possible sense, than I could have imagined it. It is like a machine, it is composed of individual elements and at some point it runs by itself and I am no longer needed.” Numerous layered lines trace the production process, as well as the density of the artist’s time spent thinking in the present. This is Stegmaier’s first solo exhibition in Japan.

German Stegmaier was born in 1959 in Mühldorf, Germany. He started to study mathematics and theory of science at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and soon switched to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and later on at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has held more than 30 solo exhibitions to date including at the Landesmuseum Mainz and Neue Pinakothek in Munich. After spending some years in Amsterdam, New York and Rome, he returned to live and work in Munich. His work is included in numerous public collections such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Kunsthaus Zürich, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin (The Berlin State Museums) and many other museums and private collections throughout Europe and the US.