Symptoms of the City
This exhibition is introducing the art scene of Leipzig settled late 19^th century centered German contemporary art. German contemporary art faces great change as the Berlin wall collapsed in 1989. A group of artists(Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel, Peter Busch etc.) from HGB(Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig) separates from traditional initiative painting and create the ‘New Leipzig school and leads new stream of German modern art influenced by East Berlin artists who were isolated from the influence of American and Europe art.

These artists are currently still actively working with galleries in the city of contemporary art, New York, and positioning as global artists. Through the innovation of Leipzig expended the city and found various art projects and interaction which gathered artists from Europe and other countries. The three artsts introduced in this exhibition, Hendrik Voerkel, Kata Lips, Yelena Inozemtseva, are the artists based at Leipzig. Through their works, we will be able to see how East German art is influenced by German contemporary art and how the symptoms of great change are shown in their works.

Hendrik Voerkel focuses on the city’s desolate and vacuum spaces produced by the rapid change of the era. Mankind does not appear in his paintings although street signs, barricades, unfinished buildings are created by humen. The artist experienced and grew in chaos of German unification. Going through the changes of environment, strong and calm stare towards the reality have shown in his early works as main subjects. His recent works shown at this exhibition are showing new changes from his earlier works which are use of bright candy color and impasto technique. He builds up carefully made color tapes to create sharp surface texture and three dimensional effect. ‘Defferent truth’, ‘Solitaire’, ‘Price tag’ are already expressing symbols of title itself. At the same time, they are emphasizing the originality of Leipzig painting.

Kata Lips deals with captured moments of nature in her paintings and experiments with various medium shows further developed paintings of Leipzig. Especially in ‘Bird’ series, she creates scenes where freely drawn ink marks resemble shaking water plants in the water. The bird figure on top of ink emphasizes delicacy between chance-painted background and realistic portrayal of the bird. In her works, birds function as symbols of people’s anxiety from rapid social change. Lips reveals the theme of her works through anxiety between result of chances and descriptive materials. Lips mostly draws bigger size of paintings and she is showing her recent series of ‘Bird’ in this exhibition.

Yelena Inozemtseva explores the uncertainty of past, present and memory by using unique painting of dark and secrecy portraits. The artist creates layers with fluid tempera which gives water color effect and acrylic paints to create complicated multi-colored paintings. As a result, some parts blur away and emphasized parts appear as pattern forms. Her particular technique is chosen in order to express memories that transforms as time passes and piled up pieces of memory. In ‘Fellow Travelers’, which has unique clear color tone of tempera, suggests a scene without any space time nor particular meaning. Viewers often question about information regard the scene but the artist draws people in her work only with her personal momery which leaves indefinite meanings behind.