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Phil Sims |
On Wednesday, the 16th of April 2008 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. the Baukunst Galerie opens a great solo-exhibition with works of the American Phil Sims introduced by Julia Höner, cultural scientist and curator. It is the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery. Beside a well directed selection of current paintings from 2008 also ceramic objects of the “Tea Bowls”-series will be shown, which raise a dynamic esthetic exchange with the paintings. Parallel to this solo-show, from the 12th of April to the 13th of July 2008, the Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern will present the retrospective exhibition ”Color in my Mind“. The exhibited 164 works from different creative periods include not only paintings and Tea Bowls but also large sized ceramic sculptures.
Phil Sims was born in 1940 in Richmond, California (USA), where he first learned and taught ceramics before he studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1964 to 1965. In 1977 he moved to New York and became a charter member of the informal group of the “Radical Painters”. After a one year working stay in Santa Fé (New Mexico) in 2001 he moved into his new studio in Pennsylvania, where he still lives and works today. His paintings have been acquired by international collections and museums and were already presented in several exhibitions in Europe and the USA: At last the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster showed an eminent solo-exhibition of his œuvre in 2006. Until the 30st of March this year his paintings were also presented at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund. Amongst others and beside the already mentioned museums Sims’ works are part of the collection of the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum in Cologne, the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (F), the Collections Panza di Biumo in Varese (I), the Scripps Institute in La Jolla (Kalifornien, USA) and the Malmö Konsthall (S).
The outstanding quality of Phil Sims’ paintings is due to the sensual, emotional experience of color. Thus he follows the tradition of the New York School from the 50s and 60s – painters as Rothko, Still and Newman. He adopts from them the primacy of color and the principle of the “allover”. In contrast to the “Colorfield-Painting“ he decides in favor of structuring a single color. Though his paintings can not be referred to as monochromes, but rather as ‘portraits of color’. They are the result of a fine, scumbling apply of several, different layers of hues with a broaden soft brush, which leaves marks of the moving hand on the canvas. In the exhibited ”Sea Paintings“ (2008) this gestural structure is exceptional expressive. The nine paintings are the outcome of an intensive examination of the oil painting “Walchensee bei Mondschein” (1920) of Lovis Corinth, which belongs to the Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern. They are evidence of Phil Sims’ characteristic profession to deal with the places of issue on the one hand and the tradition of painting on the other hand.
In his “Navigator Paintings” Phil Sims also models the accurate selection of the pigments and binding agents on Old Masters as Tizian, Rembrandt or Veronese. They enable him to apply the color in a way, which does not brake the light, but allows the permeation of the layers of hues. Thus the different gestular structured shades of the superposed layers establish a fusion, which defies any kind of prevalent conceptual classification of color. The exhibition title “The Interplay of Color“ refers to this complex interaction of the different shades at the surface of the painting. The single color is the fruit of sensitive fathomed relations and evolves from the different angles and incidences of light a fascinating vitality. The simultaneity of the diverse, constantly changing perceptions creates an intense experience of color, which unfolds its presence.
The Tea Bowls embody with their dull, earthy coloring a counterpoint to the brighter paintings. Phil Sims fired the ceramics by an extensive, traditional technique in a Japanese cave kiln (Anagama) 5-6 days long up to 1400°C. Since this kiln is solely fired by wood, the mergence of the clay and the flue dust generates a natural ash glaze. On closer inspection one can recognize remarkable parallels to the paintings: the ceramics also feature a multi layered opaque structure and a wide spectrum of gradated colors. They contain an actual volume, which corresponds with the depth of the first coat shining through the translucent layers of his paintings. In the visually stunning juxtaposition of the both groups of works the Tea Bowls loose the character of a functional object and at the same time the ‘pictures’ become objectified painting in the sense of painted color. They do not have color, they are color.
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