Andreas Fischer and Daun Suh
Past Tense, Future Perfect
November 11–December 16
Reception: Wednesday, November 11, 4:00-6:00 p.m. Artist Talk at 4:30

Andreas Fischer and Daun Suh invite us to peer in, using color and sensitively calibrated light as material. We are often missing contextual information – Suh’s emerging figures are enrobed in darkness, whereas Fischer’s canvas is so suffused with light that the figure-ground relationship is almost flattened. These artists provide a tenuous but soft landing, inviting introspection without the baggage of past or future.

Rather than function as subterfuge or avoidance, these strategies of ambiguity provide a space for deeper contemplation, hovering in the present moment that is both suggestive and inconclusive. The light that reveals can also be the light that obscures, as each artist adjusts the aperture, stopping within a space of uncertainty.

This dance with presence and absence begins with accumulated layers of mark-making, arriving at a moment that is in-flux, a provisional murmuration. Suh’s figures appear to be in the condition of emergence, inducing us to question what we are seeing, as one might see the suggestion of forms while eyes adjust to a darkened room. Darkness is a way for her to confront discomfort and uncertainty while coaxing a suffused radiance to partially materialize. This facilitates our engagement as well, perhaps allowing an ambient echo of the artist’s process. Suh alludes to a struggle with incompleteness, but through her work she finds that “living while broken” is simply a condition of being human, and coaxing this sustained attention is a gift to the viewer who takes the time to look.

Fischer’s indeterminate figure ground relationships indulge in the impossibility of fixed meaning or placement – the threshold is always moving. Formally, the edges of his figures appear to elide and disregard boundaries, but there is a buoyancy that is displaced across the picture plane which maintains a luminous equilibrium. Again, our eyes want to adjust to discover what is perceptible. The work reveals his interest in things “coming together and falling apart”, expanding that exploration quite literally in his reuse of painting scraps, disinterred from their original source and given new life in alternate formats. He generously shares his process with the viewer, including paint color tests at the margins of his work and watercolor studies that inform his paintings. Yet, like Suh, he declines to share the origins of his source material. He rebuilds, but in a discursive manner.

A ‘future perfect’ is inherently unattainable, but the striving is rich with possibilities and flashes of insight, redolent with the precarity of the present moment, expanding our definition of what connection can be.

Andreas Fischer has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Nathalie Karg and Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York; Devening Projects, Goldfinch Gallery, and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago. Awards include Artadia Grant and The International Studio and Curatorial Program Residency, New York. He has a BFA in Studio Art from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and attended the Universität der Künste, Berlin.

Daun Suh is a South Korean painter based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Kookmin University in Seoul. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Epiphany Center for the Arts, Zhou B Art Center, and Bodock Gallery. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings (Midwest Issue) and Visual Art Journal, and in an interview with AATONAU.

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Tags: Andreas Fischer, Chicago, Daun Suh, Past Tense Future Perfect, The O'Connor Gallery