Current Exhibition

Don Porcella ‚Natural Selection’
and
Susanne Ring ‚Lignification’
September 3rd until October 9th, 2010

Cain Schulte Gallery Berlin opens the fall season with a double solo exhibition, presenting New York artist Don Porcella and Berlin artist Susanne Ring. Porcella's installation Natural Selection and Ring's Lignification create a humorous and peculiar dialogue about the meaning of life and the appended questions about human existence. The exhibitions will be opened with a reception on September 3rd at 7 pm. Both artists will be present.

Porcella's installations combine sculptures, made out of braided pipecleaner with encaustic panels, suggesting a lighthearted frivolity that conceals a deeper environmental and nature loving agenda, and his understanding of consumerism, reality and our own weird mortality. Porcella sees Natural Selection as an opportunity to shed light on our wasteful ways and poke fun at human's tendency to harm the environment. Spoofing Darwin's famous proclamation, this exhibition is a selection of objects relating to nature, tied together with his own imagery of the suburban, his interest in folk art, cartoons, and science fiction, memories of shopping malls and huge hikes through California and Nevada's spectacular mountain wilderness.

Porcella's paintings, drawings and sculpture allow the subjective and strange to penetrate humorous representations of a wildly imaginative reality. His unique approach of making his own encaustic paintings reinforces the significance of life's blunders presenting a mysterious world that is shamelessly awkward and unabashedly comical.

Don Porcella was born in Modesto, California and studied art and psychology. After his Bachelor, he moved to New York to obtain a MA in painting and sculpture at Hunter's Collage. He was assistant to Miriam Schapiro and David Sale, Porcella's art has been exhibited at galleries in New York City, Berlin, Germany, East Hampton, NY, Paris, France, Portland,Oregon, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, California. The West Collection (www.westcollection.org) purchased an entire installation in 2008 and he has been featured in several art related publications.

*****

I think of the metaphor of a fishing net in the ocean, when selecting my ideas, or viewing my mental structures. Sometimes, things I fish will be thrown back and sometimes, I find useful things and keep them. But this is not necessarily a conscious process, but more a ‚fishing in the dark? and hoping that something useful will stick.

Susanne Ring
(from ‚smutnas', Saarländisches Künstlerhaus Saarbrücken e.V.,
Silke Feldhoff, Susanne Ring, 2008)

Susanne Ring's installation ‚Lignification' represents such a fishing net with a flowing ensemble of sculptures, drawings, ceramics and paintings. Ring explores the brittleness underneath our psychological surface in a conglomeration of several single works of art, created in a variety of psychological surface in a conglomeration of several single works of art, created in a variety of materials. Questions about human existence are suggested comically and straightforwardly, and playfully arranged, depicting portraits of inner circumstances, intermingled with allusions to things eerie, phantasmagorial and grotesque.

The sculptures are of ceramic, stone and wood and indicate decayed bodies, cuts, injuries or crippledness, and give human fragility and vulnerability a coltish platform.

Susanne Ring was born in Mainz, Germany and lives and works in Berlin and Dresden. She finished her MFA at the UdK in Berlin, being a highly recognized student of Prof. Dieter Appelt and Prof. Christiane Möbus. At the moment she is assistent Professor at the School of Arts in Dresden. Her works have been presented by various galleries in Europe and Japan and are collected in several public and private collections.