Martin Kasper's Ironic Return to Modernist Abstraction at Galerie Eric Mircher

German painter Martin Kasper (born 1962) presents an exhibition at Galerie Eric Mircher in Paris from January 8 to February 28, 2011. Kasper's work offers an ironic return to the early 20th-century shift from realism to abstraction, influenced by architecture, technology, and mathematics. He paints the interiors of monumental modernist European buildings, depicting them empty and abandoned to the vibration of their abstract immensity. Using the means of abstract painting, he creates a paradoxical illusion of realistic figuration, making the spaces appear strange. Though seemingly photographic, his compositions involve dynamic lines, formal abstraction, blurring, semiotic conventions, simulated transparency and surface effects, inversions, suspensions, superimpositions, and reversible interpenetrations of inside and outside. Many works feature ovoid structures borrowed from real-world locations such as train stations, convention halls, and museums across Eastern and Western Europe. These forms reveal a pictorial being of mental spirals and an indistinct entanglement of reality and abstraction. The exhibition includes a text by Emmanuel Brassat.