ALEXANDER ISKIN: PLANET TOPSPIN
September 8 to October 6, 2018
Alexander Iskin
4 Leiber des Rudolf Steiner, 2017Oil on canvas
71 × 55 in; 180 × 140 cm
Track 16 presents Berlin-based artist Alexander Iskin in his first U.S. solo exhibition.
Highly influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s concepts in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 28-year-old Iskin attempts to keep in mind that representational cliches are ripe within the artist’s mind before even paint touches blank canvas. This wrestling with how representational images are stored in the consciousness is one of the themes of his work. This gave birth to his “interreality” painting process, where Iskin purposely consumes large amounts of information through the Internet, and then paints (oil is his preferred medium), attempting to let loose subconscious imagery.
Iskin’s work emerges from his ideas about “interreality” which is the world between digital and physical existence. Considering what it means to be a passive consumer of quick and successive images through phones, Apple products are specifically the target of his work. Iskin’s ideas about image consumption culminated in a performance at Sexauer Gallery in Berlin where Iskin, with the side glance of humor on the pun, Iskin eats a crisp apple while pummeling an iPhone and a Mac computer with a sledgehammer, punctuating the show with his own retreat from social media. In some works Iskin uses iMac computer lookalikes as frames for oil paintings. By placing the painting where the screen once existed, the work becomes an internal internet with only a static image.
For Iskin, the painting process is highly dynamic, as the artist is physically in continual motion around the piece that he is working on in an attempt to limit the influence of cliches hidden within representation. This idea is now pushed even further in his upcoming exhibition, as a new body of work is mounted for rotation so the viewer can rotate the paintings between four different views. This experience mirrors the process of their creation.
Also on exhibit will be his installation painting Baby Beuys. Of the performance surrounding the work Iskin said, "I made this pink school board with Interreality paintings inside and some teenagers from the Generation Z (Digital Natives) were interpreting the paintings in a school lesson in the gallery. They had pencils, brushes, colors, etc. and could look at the piece to draw some inspiration out of it. Meanwhile the other attendees could listen to laughters of some teenagers of this generation through a pink MP3 Player. After the school lesson the board was closed and the teenagers put their drawings on the metal school board with some magnets. I think that art gets accessible through fun. In a Beuys sense, art is the only solution of surviving.”
