60SIX presents “Under the Volcano”, Jürgen Trautwein’s thirteenth exhibition at the gallery.
The work utilizes antique prints depicting images from frescoes of Pompeii, which the artist found in a recycling facility. The prints illustrate a civilization frozen in time in its destruction in 79AD. Trautwein continues his process of painting with intentional accidents guided by the materials and their transformations in the moment. He works on front and back and often adds materials. His process unearths paintings with a quality of being something that sprung from the ground by chance, or always existed and was changed.
In this series, which the artist calls “a pairing project”, he pairs the reworked prints with his abstract paintings, which were painted separately from but inspired by the prints. Trautwein says “At the center of these works are questions of transience and fragmentation: how images endure, how they break apart, and how they are restored through time. The act of reworking becomes a form of archaeological gesture, one that acknowledges destruction while resisting closure.”
Through contrasting historic imagery and abstract painting these visual duets conjure notions of the ancient and the modern, the material and ephemeral, the timeless and the temporary.
