Everything Ecstatic / Everything Ecstatic

Work

Markus Linnenbrink / Everything Ecstatic / 2006 / Installation View

Markus Linnenbrink / Everything Ecstatic / 2006 / Installation View 1

Markus Linnenbrink / Everything Ecstatic / 2006 / Installation View 2

Press Release

The Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to welcome German artist Markus Linnenbrink in his third solo exhibition at PSG, and Bay Area artist Jonathan Burstein in his first solo exhibition at PSG. Exhibition dates are 16 February – 25 March, 2006. The artists’ reception is Thursday, March 2, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Markus Linnenbrink extends his exploration of material, line, and color in Everything Ecstatic. On exhibition are sculpture, and drilled and poured epoxy resin paintings. Linnenbrink expanded the dialogue of Gene Davis in his resin paintings of vertical stripes, discarding the formalist theory of Greenbergian post-painterly abstraction for a purely hedonistic, intuitive indulgence of color and process. His paintings are layered, with vertical pouring of paint, or drilled revealing a dense environment of material and eye- popping color. His paintings pulsate with a saturated palette of metallic and fluorescent pigments mixed in clear epoxy resin. The intuitive application of material infused with pigment forms dynamic paths that invigorate the formal constructs of the work.

Linnenbrink has garnered attention in the U.S. and Europe with recent wall paintings at the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, and Haus Esters, Krefeld. Museum collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, The Hague Ministry of Culture, the Netherlands, Museum Neue Galerie, Kassel, Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenberg, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel, Block Museum of Art, IL, and Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss.

Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to welcome Jonathan Burstein in his first solo exhibition, Cut-up. Burstein received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. A painter by training, Burstein takes scissors to publication in forming his subject, namely himself, with a cloak of material derived exclusively from art periodicals. His first show focuses on his tool, the scissors, which eviscerates the printed material. Burstein then reconstitutes fragments into an elaborate collage of referencing himself. “Old Masters, young art stars, painting, video, and fashion are treated equally in the search for specific hues, tones, and patterns. The result is a conceptual and visual layering that conflates the historic and the contemporary, the famous and the obscure, culture and commerce.”

Burstein’s palette is an extravaganza of color and texture, subtly nuanced through the deft manipulation of the artist. “The figures are thus the literal and metaphorical byproduct of an aesthetic metabolism. If as a physical body, ‘you are what you eat’, then as a visual artist, I am what I see and read.”