Bodies not included
Renowned Brazilian painter and street artist Revolue pairs with celebrated composer and music artist Rupert Huber to produce an atmospheric exhibition and dynamic live-painting environment on stage at the city theatre (Stadttheater) in Baden.
Revolue will produce a series of 12 paintings, 1 as we watch, that reveal the emotional register of the human face and how our appearance reflects our interior state. Moving from the simple to the complex, these gestural works that combine ‘high art painting’ with the immediacy of street art and graffiti will highlight differences of appearances—of who we see in the mirror versus what we want to be. From a two-color palette to a universal whorl of colours, Revolue will produce a set of stills, like a film reel, or panels in a photo album—depicting stages, phases, and moments of life unfolding in front of the audience.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
The collaboration between Revolue and Rupert Huber represents a meeting of two geniuses of the ‘crossover’ between the Hi-and-Lo, Serious-and-Popular, the Institution-and-the-Street. Both artists are barrier-busters and work together on this project to burst another set of popular assumptions (and expectations) about the spaces and places most relevant for art-and-music and their consumption.
Every few years an artist breaks from the street into the space of museums and galleries – often with a bang, and from a base in downtown New York. Revolue is one of those artists. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Jean Michel Basquiat (SAMO), Keith Haring, Stephen Sprouse and Eli Sudbrack (assume vivid astro focus), Revolue has made the break from the street to the gallery (and elsewhere) and plays in both. His paintings of disembodied heads and faces are reminiscent of Basquiat (and SAMO) and feel positively familiar in that sense—audiences can intuit their pedigree and at the same time sense their deftness and immediacy. In addition to oils, Revolue uses fast-drying commercial materials to produce his paintings—acrylic, crayon, and spray paint—a nod to street painting (bombing and tagging). Ever since Jackson Pollock painted on glass for Hans Namuth’s cameras in 1950, gestural painting has been considered to live ‘in the moment’ and to include elements of performance. In this exhibition, Revolue pushes this idea a step further.
Rupert Huber is one of Austria’s most renowned contemporary composers, music artists, and musicians, whose work constructs remarkable aural and architectonic spaces for sounds, music, and the imagination, visual imagination included (especially in relation to his notation). Huber often collaborates with other artists—such as Revolue—to produce context-specific performances and experiences that expand the audience’s understanding of a given art form and a given space. Here the art form is painting, and what it is that constitutes an ideal theatrical and/or exhibition space. Huber is best known internationally for his collaboration with Richard Dorfmeister in the band TOSCA, which has released 14-albums in the last 20-years and has played at many of the worlds preeminent festivals and venues.