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Steingrímur GautiUntitled, 2023Oil, acrylic, chalk on canvas280 x 200 cm (118 1/8 x 78 3/4 in)
12 January – 17 February 20244 rue des Minimes, 75003 ParisVernissage: Friday 12 January, 6 – 8 pmFeaturing special music performances by Pauline Mikó from OPYA at 6:15 / 7 / 7:45 pmGalerie Marguo is proud to present Chop Wood, Carry Water, an exhibition by Iceland-based artist Steingrímur Gauti. On view from 12 January to 17 February 2024, this is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.Gathering a body of works made over the last year, the exhibition reflects the 'delicate dance between embracing the ego's constructive aspects and recognizing its potential pitfalls.' Terrestrial and sublime, these mixed-media works evoke the vegetal and mineral realms, but ultimately only refer to themselves: conduits of energy, movement, and color passed along from the artist, via the canvas, and ultimately to the viewer. 'There can be a long story behind what I do. But it doesn’t matter.'Artist: Steingrímur Gauti -
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There is a Zen proverb that states, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." The meaning: all begins and ends with work. The sacred, or spiritually elevated, does not surpass the profane but is rather found within its crevices.Steingrímur Gauti’s expansive abstractions, which oscillate through scales of agitation and serenity, manifest this philosophy. They reflect the artist’s ongoing negotiation with the paradoxical dialectic of freedom and rigorous discipline.
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Ranging in dimensions from the hand-held to life-sized, the collection is linked through a terrestrial palette of rust, crimson, taupe, moss, and steely grays, jolted by the occasional cobalt and sporadic flashes of white and black that seem to skid and crash along the paintings' surfaces. Evocative of the vegetal and mineral realms, the nursery of plants that populate Gauti’s studio, as well as the stark and severe Icelandic landscape beyond it, these canvases ultimately only refer to themselves.
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Steingrímur Gauti
Untitled, 2023Oil, acrylic, graphite, chalk on canvas
200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in) -
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Steingrímur Gauti
Untitled, 2023Oil, acrylic, graphite, chalk on linen
150 x 160 cm (59 x 63 in) -
Gauti likens the encounter to the act of listening to music, resisting the notion that (abstract, non-representational) art must be understood, or that there is something to understand, in order to be experienced. The act of mark-making, while physically fixed and bound in time, is also approached as something ephemeral and ever-evolving; an exercise in non-attachment and energetic flow.
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Gauti’s method of working materializes a karmic sense of cyclicality and interconnectedness, the belief that nothing comes from nothing. First, he stacks swaths of cotton and linen on the studio floor, steeping them in the dust, debris, and atmosphere of his working environment. Then, using acrylic and oil paints, as well as mark-making tools such as oil sticks, pastels, and chalk, he begins composing on the top-most layer of cloth, which seeps and stains those below.
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Steingrímur Gauti
Untitled, 2023Oil, acrylic on canvas
153 x 83 cm (60 1/4 x 32 5/8 in)
Framed: 173 x 101 x 3 cm (68 1/8 x 39 3/4 x 1 1/8 in) -
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These haphazard marks and shadows provide a blueprint for the following canvas, generating a sense of serial interconnectedness that contradicts the art historical emphasis within abstract painting on the individual artist and unique object.Quite contrarily, through this method of painting, Gauti carves out a space for the salient hands of Chance and Time, generating collaborative paintings that, in some cases, appear like alchemically oxidized terrains of pigment. The dissonant backgrounds and foregrounds of these nebulous landscapes conjure the differing tempos and rhythms through which they’ve been forged. They invite us to meet them in the moment.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Portrait of Steingrímur Gauti. © Steingrímur Gauti. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marguo. -
