'Anne Neukamp: The Prop Master' Aug. 17–Sept. 28, 2018

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present a major exhibition of paintings by Anne Neukamp.

Neukamp's work uses icons derived from our vernacular environment, the image bank of the consumer society: our mental archive of animation characters, heraldic details, letters from the media and advertising pictograms. She creates a personal identity by the repeated use of these identifiable signs coupled with an idiosyncratic palette. A grey pebbled ground reads spatially like snow on a computer screen. The hand icon is ironically emblematic as these work-intensive constructed images do not retain the malerisch or painterly passages of traditional painting. These are not "hands;" they are flat cartoonish shapes of hand symbols. Her airbrushed passages generate ripples in space, yet there are also flat black and white columnar illusions like Leger kiosks. Neukamp recombines and cracks the codes of representation, shifting and destabilizing meaning. Serenely surreal and strikingly rigorous, her mechanical images are quite familiar and yet uncanny, removed, distant. These are fragmentary paintings for the age of the internet: pictorial, falsely spatial, simulated, intelligent.

Neukamp (born 1976 in Düsseldorf, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She has had over twenty solo shows and participated in over sixty group exhibits worldwide, including: Marlborough Contemporary, New York (US); Greta Meert, Brussels (BE); Lisa Cooley, New York (US); Jr Projects, Toronto (CA); Gregor Podnar, Berlin; Kunstverein Oldenburg (DE); Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (DE); KunstWerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (US); and Galerie des Galeries, Galerie Lafayettes, Paris (FR). She is the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and she resided in this context at the ISCP (International Curatorial and Studio Program) in New York (US). She was nominated for the Jean-François Prat prize in 2016, Paris (FR). This is her first exhibit in Philadelphia.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.