Andreas Grimm and Adrian Rosenfeld are pleased to announce the opening of the second solo show of Matt Saunders at their Munich-based gallery. Matt Saunders, born 1975 in Tacoma, USA, studied Fine Arts at Harvard and Yale. He lives and works in Berlin.
In the main gallery, Saunders presents the first European screening of Double Matti (2006), a new two-screen animation and his first 16mm film work. The film is a portrait, inspired by an anecdote about the Finnish actor, Matti Pellonpää (1951-1995): after the actor’s early death, the director Aki Kaurismäki (in whose films Pellonpää was a regular, and something of an alter-ego) cast his still photo, a gesture of extending his friend’s filmography past his life. Saunders’ film assembles more than a thousand drawings made with ink on mylar from a short sequence (essentially a still image) of Pellonpää from Kaurismäki’s film Ariel. Divorced from a traditional storyboard, the animation follows the process (including the transformation and boredom of repetition) of the drawing. On one screen, the actor is still, while his image swirls in a jittery miasma; on the other screen, the ink recedes to make a shallow space in which he shifts, blinks, and peers around. As the sequence of drawings repeats at subtly different speeds, a soundtrack, made in collaboration with Berlin-based musician Billy Davis, keeps pace with the projectors and provides a voice addressing the mute, flickering pictures. The subject of the film becomes the artist’s engagement with the image, while at the same time presenting a tender and melancholy moving portrait (akin to a screen test) of the actor, re-animated by the film, but only able to live within it.
Along with the film will be two new groups of paintings. Large, oil-on-linen portraits of the German actress, Hertha Thiele, find conceptual and formal affinities with the film. A group of new paintings made with oil paint and silver ink on mylar continue Saunders' series of portraits in which the image is imbedded within the surface of the picture. Speaking to the uncanniness of frozen time and material medium, the silver surfaces are both a luminous veil and interference to the portrait. Finally, Saunders will show a series of new photographic works, printed from hand-drawn negatives.
Matt Saunders will be on view through October 21, 2006. Please contact Philipp Selzer for further information and images: +49 89 38859240 or philipp@grimmrosenfeld.com.
Grimm|Rosenfeld New York, Dasha Shishkin, September 16 - October 28, 2006
Artforum, Berlin, September 30 - October 4, 2006
Year 06, London, October 12 - 15, 2006
NADA, Miami Beach, December 6 - 10, 2006
GRIMM|ROSENFELD, Theresienstrasse 56/Rgb, 80333 Muenchen. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Fridays 12.00 - 7.00 pm and Saturdays 11.00-2.00 pm. www.grimmrosenfeld.com
