OLIVER ROSS--Hard Edge Hippie Brain

After this summer of artistic mega events and worst case senarios, at a time, when in Venice the parties of the Biennal became more important than the exhibitons, when the curators of Documenta 12 cheerfully celebrated the "art of failure" and the critics reported that contemporary art has been completely swallowed by the mainstream and therefore lost its avantgarde edge, Oliver Ross steps forward to prove us all wrong. With his second one man show at White Trash Contemporary this Hamburg based painter and installation artist transforms the gallery into a mind exploding Gesamtkunstwerk, reminding us, how captivating and sensual, how provocative and critical artistic practice can still be.

This show is not about the legitimacy of figurative versus abstract painting, or a new definition of sculpture or video art. For Oliver Ross all these artistic genres are equally fitting mediums to create strong, visually and intellectually compelling images -- archaic philosophical classification systems, mental abstractions, sexually loaded psychic maps, walking-tours through a hyper active "Hard Edge Hippie Brain".

This time Ross has completely painted over the whole gallery space and implanted a "canalized action painting machine" made of ordinary household items and chemical tanks which refers to theoretical networks and inescapable biological systems. Or in the artist's own words: "The process has a beginning and an end like our discribable individual life which starts with birth and ends with death. Between these events there is production, lust and aversion, time passes, energy is used, but we don't know what was before or what will be after."

Whoever has seen Oliver Ross' highly complex installations with their towering "mental garbage", the bite marks, the strong colors and delicate surfaces, realizes that this is something new, something that has to be read like an exciting book. Ross turns the hypnotic inside out, he visualizes the neurosis and obsessions of our society and he does it with a winking eye that makes us believe that there is still hope for contemporary art.

Oliver Ross (born 1967 in München) studied fine Arts at HfBK Hamburg bei Prof. Bernhard Joh. Blume

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• installation
• art
• hippie
• cool
• documenta
• brain
• painting
• sculpture
• video

[VolatileDisposition]

this is ... you know.. better than a needle in the eye. but not much.

[ftlqed]

great video, its like real hard time.