Arthur Löwen

Synchron

Project Info

  • 💙 JVDW
  • 🖤 Arthur Löwen
  • 💜 Amira Hartmann

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Arthur Löwen is a Frankfurt-based artist who studied at the Kunsthochschule Mainz and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. His work has been exhibited in solo shows such as “RECORDINGS” at fiebach, minninger in Cologne, “KOUN(T)ƏR POINT” at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Aachen, and “Panorama” at JVDW in Düsseldorf. In this latest exhibition, “Synchron”, Löwen returns to JVDW with new works from his “Variation”, “Synchron”, and “Terroir” series. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Löwen’s evolving oeuvre and provides insight into his pictorial worlds. At the core of Löwen’s practice is the exploration of various key moments in painting, with process and archive playing a crucial role. His works reflect an attempt to thematize creative processes through a physical and performative practice. The creation of individual paintings follows imaginary scripts derived from Löwen’s past experiences, passing through different phases that negotiate the production of painting and resemble a choreography in their execution. Löwen’s series of works are determined by sign-like traces that at first still refer to an origin or impulse but in their totality weave themselves into a self-referential, unstable cluster of pictorial decisions. In addition to the central element of writing, which becomes a line, seemingly arbitrary objects and the artist’s own body thus also become pictorial elements and determine the work compositions, which are not free of coincidences. The process of creating the paintings involves applying thin layers of paint to the front of the canvas, which is then covered by a final contrasting layer. While this last layer is still wet, the painting support is placed on an absorbent cotton cloth; the back side of the painting now becomes the parallel playing field of image making. The artist’s knee prints become elements in the final product, as do the traces of a plastic chair tumbling across the canvas. The front and back of the picture carrier unite in the final product – the imagery worlds created on the back become the negative on the front. After the work is completed, the cotton cloths used in the process function as an archive and contain all traces of the working process. These cloths also contain a kind of nostalgia, serving Löwen as a document and evidence of the past process. In Löwen’s solo show Synchron this process becomes visible as an integral part of the exhibition through the presentation of his archival material, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the creation of the artworks. The tubes, on which the artist’s archive is rolled up, reference the individual architecture of the JVDW gallery and, as sculptural elements, echo parts of the identity of the space. As an installation, the Tubes show how Löwen’s archive is stored. Löwen’s works address aspects of sense and nonsense, meaning and meaninglessness, and awaken in the viewer the human need for decoding. The desire to decipher what is seen plays a central role in Löwen’s work through the transformative abstraction of writing and the word, which actually serves to convey content, into line and painterly element. Overall, “Synchron” offers an overview of Löwen’s work, referencing the previous solo exhibition “Panorama” at JVDW while also featuring new works that reflect Arthur Löwen’s artistic process and his intense engagement with painting as a whole.
Amira Hartmann

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