The Good, the Purple and the Weird – HVW8 BERLIN

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, 11 September 2019
6:00pm – 10:00pm
HVW8 Berlin – Linienstraße 161, 10115 Berlin

HVW8 Gallery Berlin is pleased to present The Good, the Purple and the Weird, a group exhibition exploring care, spirituality and experimentation in contemporary creation. The show finds connections between ideas in paint, drawings and ceramics, bringing together recent works by seven artists from Berlin and Brussels: Sascha Brylla, Paul Ferens, Maxime Fragnon, Annabell Häfner, Viktoria Maliar, Jacopo Pagin and François Patoue. Embracing their diverse aesthetics and methods of production, the exhibition reveals small truths about common references for describing memories, atmospheres and intimacies.

The Good, the Purple and the Weird is an offering of dreamlike visions, exhibiting a new visual language of signs and symbols. Among the selected works, Jacopo Pagin’s drawings are embedded with mythological references to vitality, and explore patterns in colour pastel which recall the textures and anatomy of trees. Earthly motifs also surface in the work of Maxime Fragnon, the naturalist of the ensemble, whose mixed media ceramics are infused with found elements of flowers and pebbles. In the scratched tempera painting by Sascha Brylla, created with the sgraffito technique as part of his Hunting Scene series, wild animal subjects are both revealed and disguised in their environment. Such relics of remembered and imagined scenery are also present in Annabell Häfner’s hazy hotel interiors, which meditate on the ambience and melancholia of impersonal space. The abstract landscapes of Paul Ferens nestle between real and impossible environments, and Victoria Maliar’s silhouettes emerge like spirits in a midnight jungle, with both artists summoning the psychology of dreams and possible realms of the subconscious. François Patoue’s oil paintings are studies of deep, passionate colour, created with chemical reactions that guide his media to transform and reveal itself on the canvas.

The Good, the Purple and the Weird is curated by Agathe André de Tremontels.

Pictures Justyna Fedec