Kim Bartelt: Break Easy

Cadogan Gallery is delighted to present Break Easy, an exhibition of new works by German artist Kim Bartelt. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition with Cadogan and the first time her work will be shown in Milan. In Break Easy, Bartelt has created a series of paintings that mediate on the ephemerality of the world and the very act of art making itself through the use of elementary form and translucent colour. Made in response to a statement once posed by the poet, Ocean Vuong, that the most powerful and strengthening thing an artist can do is to "bring down the shield (they've) been taught to put up around them", the works in the series reveal a pulsing inner landscape that resonates with intellectual introspection and discordant energy.

A sense of fragility pervades these works, a precariousness as fine and fragile as the thin, membranous paper the artist fixes onto the canvas. These delicate sheets, slightly ripped and alive with snaking lines or capillaries, are pasted on to the rougher, unprimed side of the canvas, where the fibrous texture comes through and indents itself directly onto the angular forms. In each painting we see the gradual alterations throughout the series as Bartelt explores the progressive layers of thought, producing visual expressions of the inexplicable. Like metaphoric shields, they become symbolic manifestations of the guards we put up around ourselves; channeling the vibration of life's events to move from the personal and subjective to the broad and universal.