Month: April 2011

September 11, 2004 – October 29, 2004

Once again, John Lurie brings his own genuine and soulful touch to the world. On this occasion, it is through his works on paper and their unique mixture of comedy, rawness, and emotion.Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1952, John Lurie moved to New York in 1976. With his brother, Evan, he formed the musical group The Lounge Lizards in 1978.

The Lounge Lizards, embedded in the frenetic downtown no-wave scene, drew their influences from jazz, classical, African, and other ethnic music. In the mid-80’s, Lurie scored and starred in the cult classic films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down By Law”. He has scored countless films, and was nominated for a Grammy for his score on “Get Shorty”. In the late 90’s, Lurie directed and acted in his own television series, “Fishing With John”, which has been described as “JacquesCousteau on LSD”. Lurie has been drawing and painting for 30 years.

Illness and the unseemly nature of the music business have caused him to drift from music, and for the last two years he has been able to focus his creative energies on painting. Naive and bittersweet, his drawings bear the mark of an outsider, a quality present throughout his idiosyncratic career. Lurie adds, “I like to draw and paint. It is a river to me. I am not an Indian.”

May 7, 2004 – June 5, 2004

November 30, 2006 – January 7, 2007

September 9, 2010 – October 1, 2010

From the 09—14 September, the Gallery Daniel Blau will be having a set of consecutive exhibitions by four exponents of the LE GUN artists collective: Robert Rubbish, Chris Bianchi, Stephanie von Reiswitz and Bill Bragg. Founding members of the LE GUN group and the publication of the same name, these London-based artists are united by the medium of illustration on paper.

9 September, 11—18 pm: Stephanie von Reiswitz
Munich-born and very much immersed in the London universe, Stephanie von Reiswitz depicts surreal tales of past glories and tragedies, while rendering through her sombre colours and shapes an aesthetic reminiscent of the Weimar Republic.

10 September, 18—21 pm: Chris Bianchi
A self-invented Maltesian, Chris Bianchi’s somewhat surreal ideas are rendered in landscapes where new perspectives lead onto more and the viewer will find their mind pleasantly boggled.

11 September, 11—18 pm: Robert Rubbish
A unique Londoner and notorious Soho character, Robert Greene (a.k.a. Robert Rubbish), comprises half of the Victorian punk revivalist duo, the Rubbish Men, and shares generously a slice of his world through an adventurous synthesis of drawings and writing.

12 September, 11—18 pm: Bill Bragg
An illustrator with an appreciation for the deeper shades that a pencil can afford, this Englishman depicts fragmentary tales of mystery and conjures unlikely characters in a beautifully noir-esque style.

After the Open Art Galerie Daniel Blau presents a group exhibition of all the members of LE GUN including Neal Fox, who already had two very successful solo shows at Galerie Daniel Blau.

May 5, 2011 – June 3, 2011

“The bare facts speak for themselves: born in Berlin in 1922 and now generally regarded as the greatest living English painter, espeialle of people, both female and male. The artist’s father Ernst Ludwig Freud, a German architect, was the son of the great Sigmund Freud. After his fathers’s death in London in 1970, Lucian commenced a remarkable series of paintings of his mother Lucie Brasch, around ten in all, as well as a munber of drawings and etchings. Lucie was the daughter of a prosperous grain merchant from the Baltic coast and what is perhaps one of the earliest of these head-and shoulder paintings foms the centrepiece in this exhibition. The painting seems to anticipate what is certainly the finest – and in England most controversial – portrait of Quenn Elizabetg II, a similarly small, head-and-shoulder depiction of a great, if stern, mother figure.

The faces of Freud’s sitters nearly always exude a sense of inward reflection. They seem lost in their own reverie which the artist constantly observes and describes. For Lucian Freud flattery is never an issue, nor is moral judgement nor psychological analysis. There is also no sense of caricature or mockery at the human condition either, as one might find in the work of the artist Otto Dix. Wheter the sitter is staring at the artistm looking down or even looking away, an almost inevitable sense of melancholy prevails, as the artist captures what in essence is a fleeting and ephemeral moment – paradoxically over as many as a hundred sittings – immortalised on that unpredictable path from one instance to the next. That is perhaps part of the beauty and attraction of all attempts at painting or drawing reality and the special quality of psychological portraiture.” – Exerpt from the essay by Norman Rosenthal, published in Lucian Freud: Portraits, Hirmer/Daniel Blau(ed.), Germany, 2011.

April 7, 2011 – April 30, 2011

“Though the poetics of the atomic sublime might reassuringly couch its explosive potential in the language of nature, still it was a product of man, of culture.”

This inaugural exhibition at Daniel Blau’s London gallery makes a particular statement about the development and positioning of vintage photography. We wish to present you with an historically grounded, extraordinarily beautiful set of photographs that have come to stand as powerful visual icons, representing a salient period of international politics: The Cold War.

The image of the atomic bomb is one of unique and horrific beauty: The pictures of atomic bomb explosions – ranging from New Mexico USA, to the actual and affecting George R. Caron photographs shot from a military plane over Hiroshima – stand as representations of the difference between sublime artwork and frightful document.

This exhibition incorporates a variety of photographs, including US Navy and Air Force images of nuclear bomb tests by Edgerton and Eyerman – the former a scientific photographer and the latter with tendencies towards surrealism. This unique and historic collection of images span the period 1945 – 1970 to form a visual narrative full of power, horror and agressive beauty.

This exhibition is accompanied by a 48-page newspaper publication available from the gallery.