Seeing the Sun through closes Eyes

We warmly invite you to the opening of Dirk Eicken’s solo exhibition Seeing the Sun through closes Eyes on Friday, January 26, 2024 at Kang Contemporary Gallery.

In three series of works from the last 20 years of his career, the artist questions the possibilities of painting in the face of its failure in a fascinating way. Instead of accepting the end of painting, Eicken sees its death as a source of new vitality.

Painting serves the artist as a means of critically analyzing visibility: through his double-stretched canvases and overpaintings, he creates an invisible network of images whose complexity cannot be grasped by looking at the surface of the picture.

Eicken’s intensive engagement with American abstract art, in particular with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Donald Judd, clearly shapes his own conceptual and stylistic approach. With his two-layered paintings, Eicken ultimately disregards Stella and Judd’s maxim what you see is what you see.

Eicken’s works open up an invasive view that leads beyond the superficial layer of the picture into the depths of painting. Instead of a purely rational identification with the surface of the painting, Eicken seeks a deeper understanding and an empathetic view into the interior of the painting. His paintings show the canvas not only as a surface, but as part of a complex structure with its own history and a hidden life of its own.