Psycho

Ena Swansea and Robert Lucander at the Falckenberg Collection

Exhibition catalogue, edited by Dirk Luckow
texts (German/English) by Harald Falckenberg, Belinda Grace Gardner, Dirk Luckow, Miriam Schoofs
58 p with 40 coloured  illustrations
300 x 230 mm, softcover with flaps

ISBN 978-3-86442-000-9
 

(out of print)

Psycho in the Falckenberg Collection

Towards the end of 2011, the Deichtorhallen will present the work of two painters held in the Falckenberg Collection: Ena Swansea, born and North Carolina and living in New York, and Robert Lucander, who moved from Helsinki to Berlin during the summer before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the artists have never met, their individual oeuvres have one thing in common: they both embody a uniquely spectral take on life.
Ena Swansea inverts her earnest, almost melancholy figures by tracing the outlines in white, whereas the substance the subjects’ bodies are held in dark tones rather like backgrounds, whereas Robert Lucander figuratively incorporates the wood grain of his ground for the physical representation of shrill characters who are almost invariably fixed against garishly monochrome backgrounds. Thus neither artist divulges the identities of the depicted subjects, both painters leaving the potential for danger of the situation unresolved; the decisive aspect for the viewer should not be a possible personal relationship, but rather the disquieting nature of the situation, in short: painted human psychosis. This play on ambivalence in the depiction of people has a fixed point of reference in Alfred Hitchcock’s »Psycho« ever since 1960; there too, »murderous« tension prevails precisely because it is extremely hard to distinguish between victim and culprit in the cat-and-mouse between the characters, and so the film has lent the exhibition its title, inasmuch as Swansea and Lucander’s paintings are electrifying without the tension ever being discharged.

Exhibition:
Deichtorhallen – Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, 18/12/2011–25/03/2012