Johannes Kahrs - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Monday, June 28, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

  • Catalogue Essay

    German artist Johannes Kahrs customarily takes a photo, a video projection or a film still as the starting point for his paintings. Presented without the context of their origin, his generic subjects become monumentalized and frozen in non-sequential time, their imagery merging the banal with the horrific. Leaving the contours of his figures blurred as though floating in a hazy fog of memory, Kahrs' painting style captures the unreliable nature of photography. He transforms the art-historical tradition of painting to the point where oils on canvas seem to represent the shadows of over-exposure or the acid hues of a print. By thus detaching the image from its original meaning, Kahrs' work is suggestive of a completely new method of recording of reality, one both ethereal and mysterious.
    "The work of Johannes Kahrs frequently mixes cinema and life in order to generate a subversive critique against images and against our perception of a world that can be too easily altered by the manipulation of a few moments and frames. In Kahrs' paintings, photographs, drawings and video projections, cinema is returned to life, and it is placed on the border between representation and private memory, transgressing both contexts through an intense experience of violence or a subtle form of scepticism towards rhetoric of fiction." (J. Fernandes, Flash Art, May/June, 2002)
     

1

Hand

2001-02
Oil on canvas in the artist's metallic and Perspex frame.
77.5 x 104 x 6 cm. (30 1/2 x 41 x 2 1/2 in).
Signed, titled and dated ' J. Kahrs "Hand" 2001/02' on the reverse.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 ‡♠

Sold for £61,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2010
London