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Installation view
Exhibition
Chris Newman | Something Already Exists
23 Nov 2018 – 12 Jan 2019
Address
- Schillerstrasse 15
- 2nd floor
- Berlin
Berlin - 10625
- Germany
Travel Information
- U Ernst-Reuter-Platz, U Deutsche Oper
Chris Newman straddles worlds as an artist with no qualms about engaging with all types of media. He describes himself as “more of an intermediary”: he is not so much interested in the final product, but in art as a process that still retains its open and dynamic nature.
About
His work relies on the intensity of personal expression and on an artistic immediacy that is directly related to life itself; to his life, which provides him with a template for being human. Newman wants to free art from artifice and return to the core of perception: he is not preoccupied with the integrity of the medium, of painting or music, of style or art history. Instead, he wants the perception itself to become concrete. The work of art is a catalyst for an existential experience of life.
Despite this impression of immediacy, however, the high proportion of compositional considerations in his works should not be underestimated. After completing his Bachelor of Music at the renowned King’s College in London, he moved to Germany in 1980 to study under Mauricio Kagel at the Cologne University of Music. Since then he has been invited to numerous festivals for contemporary music. It was not until 1989 that he took up painting, for many years strictly limiting his colour palette – mostly to red, white, black and brown.
In the pictures on display, the things surrounding him in his own life become the object and with them the fragility and familiarity of the individual space that sustains us.
