ALEXANDER BUHLER 'London, Berlin 2005 - 7'

About

We have worked with Swiss artist Alexander Bühler over the past three years, building up to this, his first solo show of paintings in the UK. Alexander's work is very much a meditative process, an internal enquiry which nevertheless takes his encounter with the outside world as its starting point. In trying to understand, bumping into the physical world, as it were, he gradually becomes aware of cognitive processes which then evolve within the making of the work itself. Traces of thought seep into the canvas, as figures from the real world transmute into a pure painterly geometry, uniting the rigour of Mondrian and the delicacy of Klee in works of a confident simplicity. The exhibition is planned as an overview of his artistic activity so far in an attempt to illuminate some of the influences and echoes suggested by his itinerary: born in Zurich but studying in London, and now living and working in Berlin. The show therefore includes paintings begun here, taken and sometimes reworked in Germany, and now returning to London. Little known as he is in the UK as yet, we believe that the precision and clarity of his work gives him the potential to be, ultimately, a significant presence on the international scene. Each one of the paintings in the show, often via its title, attaches itself to a place or source in the world - the ‘park' and the ‘pool' in those paintings are not recognisable except as coloured schema, spaces mapped out, but they are surely felt, are sincere equivalents to their origin; and we are invited in. As though threaded together with a sequence of rapid stitches each painting and its fragment of world are so linked that each painting lets us back into the park, back into the pool; we journey to and return from the disparate spaces where they began, interchangeable but not identical. This is an act not of mimesis as we know it but certainly magic: a way of capturing a differently imagined world. An important feature of the show is the limited edition artist's book that Alex is proposing to make: not a catalogue of one particular exhibition but, for the spectator, a guide to his creative processes, and for Alex himself a valuable record of this stage in his professional development; just as the exhibition itself is a carefully considered presentation of his recent artistic activity amounting to an installation recording the subtle narrative of his journey.