Patrick Gabler: Circle and Cosmos Cycle
Owen Schuh: The first 198 Prime Numbers
December 3rd , 2010 until January 14th, 2011
Opening: December 3rd, 2010, 7 to 9pm

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art Berlin presents Hamburg artist Patrick Gabler and San Francisco artist Owen Schuh in a double solo exhibition. Gabler's large-format ink drawings depict precisly aligned circles and arrangements of ornaments. Gabler's harmonic systems relate to Schuh's depiction of mathematical functions, symbolizing the stuctures and interactions of life systems.

Marks of imaginative and romantic landscapes rotate in Patrick Gabler's Indian ink drawings und present a contemplative, but also a complex and moving image of labyrinths . Inspired by the landscape painting and drawings of the romantic era, he forms circles, comets, moons and pine trees out of the many little, swaying brushstrokes, which can be viewed as a contemporary variation of cartographies and copernican systems.

With uttermost gentle implementation, the precise alignment of elements in his vision, Gabler can bring each single brushstroke to paper only once,. This flowing technique suits well the creation of natural landscapes, of circles, comets and trees. It enhances it's life, effused from each stroke, turn and swing.

Patrick Gabler was born in Munich in 1967 and lives and works in Hamburg since 1989. He studied at Hamburg University of Applied Science. His large scale drawings of the Circle and Cosmos Cycle are on view in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US since 2004.

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The importance of this work, for me, lies beyond creating clever algorithms, or beautiful images. It is about understanding the nature and limits of the physical and mental worlds, and the nature and limits of that understanding itself.
Owen Schuh

Owen Schuh's work seeks to illuminate the entwining relationship between the embodied mind, mathematics, and the physical world. His complex systems are structured by mathematical functions, which, though relatively simple in nature, yield surprising organic complexity.

Schuh's work explores the relation between organic forms and mathematical symmetry. Stemming from the idea that complex natural systems and models for phenomena-like flocks of birds, slime mold, ant colonies, forest fires etc.-can be described by very simple geometric and mathematical rules, he employs these rules to create astonishing structural pieces on two dimensional surfaces. He builds structures by adding single drops of paint in oil and acrylic onto a surface until patterns emerge. Fantastic accretions in rich colors and luscious thickness sprout from the flat surfaces, very much mimicking real and imaginary organisms, and representing tangible illustrations of mathematical principles such as fractals and chaos theory.

Ultimately, the questions that's most interesting to Schuh revolves around the relationship between nature and artifice, logic and form. Rather than working from nature toward an abstract representation, he works toward nature from the abstract concept of 'pure' math. As opposed to a single fixed model, these works imply the possibility of multiple rational viewpoints of the natural world.
Owen Schuh was born and raised in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He graduated from Haverford College in 2004, received his Masters of Fine Art from Tyler School of Art in 2007 and completed his final year of study in Rome, Italy. His work is a unique blend of mathematics, philosophy and the observation of nature. It has been exhibited internationally and in numerous private collections. He currently resides in San Jose, California.

High Resolution images available upon request.