JARMUSCHEK + PARTNER
JARMUSCHEK + PARTNER
Ausschnitt_David Eager Maher - Blue Tree, 2018, Oil on Found Paper_38 x 27 cm.jpg

DAVID EAGER MAHER_EN

 

GER

DAVID EAGER MAHER
DREAM HEAD

November 3–December 15, 2018
Opening: Friday, November 2, 2018, 6—9 pm

Image: David Eager Maher, Blue Tree, 2018

 
 

With Dream Head, Jarmuschek + Partner is presenting a solo exhibition of the Irish artist David Eager Maher for the first time in the gallery space at Potsdamer.

David Eager Maher's works are complex encounters in form and content.
His collages of found papers, further developed with painting and drawing, open up entire worlds to the beholder, which spatially intertwine, overlap in time and merge thematically in a surreal manner.

The artist finds his motifs on the one hand in nature and on the other in man-made, cultural and historical objects. Although these objects may usually be clearly assigned to one sphere or the other, the interdependence and intertwining - the inspiration of the man-made world by nature and the design and penetration of nature by the human hand – becomes evident for the viewer again and again. Osciliating between harmony and melancholy, David Eager Maher's pictures appear, like in Robert Frost's poem „Tree at my window“, as diffuse, dreamlike sequences full of loneliness and oblivion. A sometimes foggy, mysterious atmosphere surrounds his works.

In their fine, playful and almost intimate details, they may remind us of 19th century works of art - and yet they are highly contemporary with their perspective breaks and their degree of abstraction. Powerful, partly pasty, depth-generating colour surfaces bring these collaged worlds to life and, with their opulence, maximally contrast with the fine pencil lines that seem like a transition to the delicate materiality of the paper.

Freshly created and reused patterns again play an important role in David Eager Maher's current series of works. They are able to point the viewer to a mysterious, further, pictorially immanent level by giving the new work a patina and, in part, its own, already lived history. They appear like framings and curtains that suggest a glimpse into another time or another place.

Abstraction and figuration, fragility and rush, paper and color, motif and background, shadow and light, the formed and the grown - everything seems to be less in competition than in a dance, interacts with one another as if on a water surface, where sometimes some elements and sometimes others appear, only to step back instantly and let the next take the lead.

Harmony. Idyll. Man. Nature.
A fragile balance.