PALINGENESIS

Friday, October 17th - Thursday November 27th, 2008

The Wall Gallery debuts on October 17th with a solo show of Berlin-based American artist Tra Bouscaren. His exhibition, PALINGENESIS, comprises collage, painting and installation.

"This is the mystery of Palingenesis...that all beings living at this moment contains the real kernel of all that will live in the future; and so to a certain extent these future beings already exist. Similarly, every animal standing before us in the prime of life seems to exclaim to us:“ Why do you complain of the fleeting nature of those who are alive? How could I exist if those of my species who existed before me had not died?"" --Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Translation by E.F.J. Payne. Oxford University Press, 1974

The individuation approached by the animal representations in Tra Bouscaren's work is overwhelmed by the cycle of life that runs through it. The animal's emotional pull on our sympathies is balanced by the seemingly arbitrary and abstract nature of their construction. The mirror we face in his work is simultaneously both hot and cold.

Bouscaren's bold handling of material is at once both expressionistic and conceptually based. He destroys much of his work down into abstracted fragments, only then to recycle those remains into the next generation of artworks--much like plants trampled in the forest that then provide the sustenance for the next that grow in their place. Inspired by Kurt Schwitters' abstract collages made from the junk of the world, Bouscaren's studio is forever awash in shifting piles of dangerous, flammable 'junk' with which most other artists try to part ways, just as decisively as he chooses to retain and continue working with it.

Bouscaren's self-referential approach builds his own artistic history back into the material he works with, thus providing an artistic gambit for sustainable development as well as a kind of automatic vision of history becoming individual, and back again. In his lust to articulate the depth of nature's proposals, Bouscaren's work is robust and changeling, layered and contemplative.

The Wall Gallery
Brunnenstr.39
10115 BERLIN