Robert Lucander: WOODOO
26.9.2008 - 2.11.2008
Robert Lucander (b. 1962) is known for his paintings that utilize human figures and the imagery of advertisements and magazines. He has eliminated the traces of painting by using acrylic paint, which he has applied evenly without apparent brushstrokes or without blending the colors together. Now there is spontaneity in the works, which is something new for Lucander. The new works are painted on wood panels or paper and the material is often left visible.
The people Lucander depicts are not individuals, but anonymous characters. He has earlier also painted public figures and celebrities, but now the attention is drawn to what is essential: the subject matter is not the depicted characters as such, but universally recognizable conditions, humane and banal absurdities.
The world of massmedia offers us ready-made stories, attitudes and conceptions, but Lucander forces the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The paintings resemble riddles. In the retouched clues the viewer can find an emotion or an ongoing situation or conflict, but doesn’t know what’s really going on. The works express a certain dramatic, but do not contain a narrative.
It’s as if Lucander thinks abstractly through the figurative painting. He examines the boundary between the abstract and figurative and turns these attributes upside down: the figures move towards the abstract and at the same time the background of the painting – the vivid wood surface that is left visible – forms a figurative element in the painting. The watercolor pen that Lucander uses accentuates the surface of the wood panel, which is always carefully chosen by the artist. The physicality of the background is an important element for the artist, which gives him means to find new ways of thinking in the still unfinished history of abstract painting.
Pilvi Kalhama
Lucander is born in Helsinki. He studied fine arts in Berlin at the Hochschule der Kunste between 1989-1995 and has since then lived and worked permanently in Berlin. Since the early 1990s Lucander has participated actively in exhibitions all around Europe and in Berlin he is represented by the renowned gallery Contemporary Fine Arts. It’s been five years since his last solo exhibition in Finland. Lucander is professor of painting at Universität der Kunste in Berlin and has also been a visiting lecturer at Akademie der bildenden Kunste in Vienna and at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary