Viewers can expect optical mash-ups and acrobatic juxtapositions at Katrin Kampmann: Goodbye Tomorrow. The work in this Berlin-based painter's first U.S. solo show weaves together layers of material and meaning, as she incorporates printing techniques into paintings and works on paper made with oil, acrylic, watercolor and ink. Kampmann is an ambassador of Berlin's neue junge wilde (“new young wild”) crew, pursuing a nascent reconceptualization of a small but salient movement of the late 1970s, which in turn evokes the Fauves (“wild beasts”), a similarly pro-tigerblood group that dominated a few seasons of French Postimpressionist salons with their fetid, shredded, violent love letters to nature's raw power. Her sumptuous, airy images both depict and obscure an array of subject matter; cars, couples, pets, shoes, gardens, cell phones, portraits, daydreams and melodramas erupt in riots of pattern and color, collapsing positive and negative space, placing street-art stencil and upper-crust pop art right alongside this rainbow splatter. The effect is deeply beautiful, and almost pretty. Like a jigsaw puzzle put back together wrong, the images drive even the most sympathetic eye to unceasing movement. But ultimately their contrapuntal structure speaks to the essential interconnectedness of all things, and of all passions.

Mondays-Fridays. Starts: March 21. Continues through April 30, 2011

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