Hartmut Austen will present a selection of paintings and drawings from the past ten years that deal with figures and landscapes. In them, figures sometime appear as if either dissolved within, separated from or alienated from their environment.



Shadow Figure, 2008, oil on canvas, 20" x 16"

September 8 - October 24
Closing Reception and release of publication with introduction by Lynn Crawford  TBA

For any inquiries, please contact the exhibition curator:
Mary F. Coats
mary.coats@gmail.com

Times Club at Prairie Lights
15 South Dubuque St.
Iowa City, IA 52240
319-337-2681

In his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Austen has produced work over the course of two years that reflect the notion of place, current events, and considerations of painting.

Derived primarily from his archive of photographic newspaper reproductions, Austen's deliberate, semi-abstract compositions embed themselves in the painterly concerns of surface, tautness and color, and are reflexive of his interest in mapping and geography.

"My paintings are often based on projected photographic source images. However the original source image is obliterated in the final painting... I manipulate the image in ways that both evoke and subvert recognition and play on voyeuristic curiosity in the final painting. In each painting I attempt to strike a balance between personal reflection and political and social currents while simultaneously commenting on the artistic medium itself."
- Austen's Artist Statement, 2014

Hartmut Austen (b. 1967, Lüdenscheid, Germany) received his Meisterschüler-degree from Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) Berlin. He also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Austen was a Grant Wood Fellow for Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History in 2013 and an inaugural Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow in 2009.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in private, corporate, and institutional collections such as The Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. Austen has been with The Butcher's Daughter gallery since 2010.

Currently, Austen works as an Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota and divides his time between Minneapolis and Detroit.

Open Thursday - Saturday, 12 to 6:00PM, Sunday, 1-4:00 PM
and by appointment 

The gallery is located at 4240 Cass Avenue, Suite 111   Detroit, Michigan 4820

T 248 890 6536 || info@thebutchersdaughtergallery.com

www.thebutchersdaughtergallery.com

EVENING AT THE COLONY presents:

 7 PM   Mollie Goldstrom, Sarah Smith and Jaime Knight

            PIZZA SPEAKEASY

8 PM    Kuldeep Singh and David Dunlap

            Another Ziggurat

Performed on a hand woven rug and involving a gong, singing along, fire lamps “and tons more”, the performances addresses issues of rebirth, condensation and accumulation.

8.45 PM  Jan Philipp Sexauer

                Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh

A task performed by some members of the audience

9 PM    Hans Breder Foundation presents

                Nancy Spero (1985)
                with
                Barbara Welch Breder

World Premiere of an interview-video with Nancy Spero from 1985

10 PM   Jaime Knight

          “This Might Be Just The Place”

Prompted by the similarities in activism concerning the overarching dread of nuclear holocaust and the AIDS crisis of the late seventies and early eighties, This Might Be Just The Place attempts to reify this historical period in which the connective potential of the dance floor became reinvented in the anti-identitarian politics of social action of groups like ACTUP. 

Using sculpture, drawing, performance, music and video Jaime Knight has created an installation that asks the viewer to question their relationship to the freedom felt in the relational field of the dance floor, where bodies collide and inhibitions are lost, and perform an act of ecstatic vulnerability through a choice of radical isolation.