Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Torben Giehler. For Giehler's second exhibition at the gallery, he continues to skirt the edges of abstraction and representation. Using grids, brilliant, synthetic colors and seemingly mathematically precise rendering, Giehler creates compositions that read as both dazzling virtual landscapes and geometrical abstractions. In many of the new paintings, Giehler's perspective is perhaps even more skewed, giving the viewer a pronounced feeling of vertigo, a more drastic approximation of speed.
For this exhibition, Giehler alternates between aerial views of completely artificial, but wholly satisfying panoramas, and mountainscapes portrayed dead on, mapping the signature planes and crags of the world's most famous peaks. While pivoting views of the landscapes evoke a confluence of connections to flight simulators, video games and superhighways, they approach closer to formal abstraction. Diagonal, crisscrossing lines break the picture plane into contemplative sections of pure color and line while at the same time urging the eye to glide over the surface.
Giehler's depiction of mountains are a pause. Giehler takes us through the parapet, delineating every facet of it's surface. Appearing as elaborately detailed blueprints for geologists, the mountains splendor does not rely on the height of its peaks, but rests instead within the composition of bedrock that rises slowly skyward. Here Giehler examines the framework through which each singular surface fuses into an apex, both challenging and highlighting paintings' traditional stance of flatness.
Torben Giehler is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has been the recipient of the James William Paige fund as well as a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Scholarship. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, including most recently a solo show at Arndt & Partner, Berlin. In the past two years Torben Giehler's paintings have been acquired by some of the worlds most renowned public and private collections. In addition to upcoming solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Houston, Milan, Athens and London, he has also been included in the upcoming survey exhibition "Painting Pictures," initiated by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Torben Giehler lives and works in NYC.