Volker Hueller
January 11, 2011 through March 6, 2011

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present an exhibition of monumental painted collage works, large-scale hand-colored etchings and portrait paintings by German artist Volker Hueller. The exhibition is on view from January 11 - March 6, 2011.  This is the artist's seventh solo exhibition and his second with Eleven Rivington.

Volker Hueller’s painted collage works resemble fractured, kaleidoscopic exquisite corpses; they are caches for a trove of mined personal, national and cultural histories. Beginning with quilted patchworks of textiles and detritus, Hueller handcrafts ambiguous spatial and figurative realms. He then paints the surfaces in shades of grey, silver, and muted tones of oil and shellac.  The resulting pictures are sphinx-like: fraught with macabre folklore but formally modernist; spatially atmospheric but actively superficial. Lesions, drips, and smears of cloth, glue and paint reveal the history of the picture’s making in the studio. Hueller's pictures are like dark wonder-cabinets for modernism's relics; they are haunted with echoes from the last century, from the glyphic mark-making and figuration of Klee to the built surfaces of Marca-Relli. Companions to the collages are large-scale hand-colored etchings: using the velvety relief of the etched line, Hueller weaves fragmented masses, volumes and body parts into semi-abstract formal constructions which carry equal measures of delicacy and violence, reverence and rebellion.  Oil portraits and gem-like painted passport photographs portray inhabitants of Hueller’s pictorial realm: masked and abstracted faces and figures.

Volker Hueller was born in 1976 in Forchheim, Germany.  He studied under painter Norbert Schwontkowski at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg and currently lives and works in Berlin.  His exhibitions include individual shows at Timothy Taylor, London (2010); Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam (2009); Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2009); and Anna-Catharina Gebbers | Bibliothekswohnung, Berlin (2008).