Chris Newman
Real Life
2023
- Artist / Artist group
- Chris Newman
- Title
- Real Life
- Year
- 2023
- Category
- Format
- Etching
- Material / Technique
- 6 etchings
- Dimensions / Duration
- 37,4 x 49 cm, motif: 29,5 x 39,3 cm
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- »Real Life« brings together six etchings in which Chris Newman transfers a principle from music onto the print: counterpoint. Newman, a trained composer and a student of Mauricio Kagel, places pictorial elements side by side that at first have nothing to do with one another. The first sheet divides like a diptych into two halves — a painter on the left, a landscape on the right. Both hold equal weight in the image; from their mere juxtaposition arises a tension that Newman relates to the relationship between inner and outer world. His starting point was the landscape painting of Camille Corot. Newman's working method is equally formative. He works the copper plates standing up, with whatever is at hand: wooden sticks, forks, household objects, his own hand and fingernails. Speed determines the depth and density of the marks. The element of chance he calls the "accident"; his sheets he describes as a collection of "happy accidents," out of which the image takes on a life of its own. The motifs come from his everyday life in Berlin — down to the last, smaller sheet, a still life of objects from his kitchen table that has the feel of a quick finger exercise and concentrates the rhythm and spirit of experimentation running through the whole series. A note on two choices: I kept accident and happy accidents as Newman's own terms — as a native English speaker, these are presumably the words he actually used, and "happy accidents" is the established English idiom. I rendered Fingerübung as finger exercise (the musical sense carries over), but if you'd prefer to foreground the manual, hands-on aspect of his etching, a quick warm-up would also work.
Author
AIR