Sebastian Guinness Gallery moves to Dawson Street and opens with a new show by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz: Liberation: Their Story Begins.
The Sebastian Guinness Gallery has moved from Temple Bar to 42 Dawson Street, built in 1910, its gracious portico has already welcomed many from the design and craft industry. It was the office of architects de Blacam and Meagher until the mid nineties and the spacious meeting room to the rear was the former atelier of Lainey Keogh. The room has been transformed, with the help of designer Brian McDonald, from a riot of colourful yarn and worktables into a pristine white space, perfectly lit as an exhibition venue.
The opening show by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz contains grand gestural pieces suitably epic for the main gallery and a series of densely worked drawings which line the foyer are redolent of old master Dutch and German engravings and convey the artists consummate skill as a draughtsman.
The gallerist and artist met at one of Von Lenkiewicz’s exhibitions in a disused bank building in London; no stranger to putting on shows in disused bank buildings, Guinness invited him to exhibit here.
Von Lenkiewicz’s work is inter-referential, paying homage to or parodying other forms of art. His depiction of Jeff Koons’ ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ piece is perhaps the most obvious and apposite. He manipulates Disney characters into deconstructed narratives, Snow White morphs into a skeletal quadruped, sagging under the weight of the seven dwarfs as Bambi stares in innocence. Traditionally innocent iconography is dismantled and exposed.
His references range from Velazquez to Bacon in ‘Portrait of Alice as Innocent X’ and his combination of Warhol’s Brillo with Lewis Carroll’s recumbent and seductive Alice plays on the advertising industry, the suggestion of the housewife’s submission to some hidden domestic bliss. He takes images we associate with fairytales, religious iconography, mythology and the old masters, combining them to produce a dark shift in perception, an unsettling reminder of the power of suggestion and the assertion that anything can be appropriated and redefined. These works are not just a chilling reminder of the manipulation of images, genres and the message; they are great works in themselves.
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz presently works in Berlin, He has exhibited throughout Europe in Maison Rouge, The Kunsthaus, Hamburg, the Palais de L’Iles, The Triumph Gallery in Moscow.
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