J-PEG Twister

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of new paintings by Torben Giehler at the gallery. For this exhibition, the artist has pulled out all the stops, completing a series of paintings that revel in a hue-amplified tempest. Alternating between flat grids and paintings that have a centered, focal point, Giehler’s work has the viewer both gliding dizzily over his surfaces and getting caught up in a maelstrom of faceted color. All sorts of phenomena come to mind, tornadoes, shifting plate tectonics, faultiness, and volcanic craters. And all of these references come filtered through an electrified circuitry, reading as a virtual universe.

Unobstructed by the pivoting views and intense color is the pitch-perfect resonance of art history. Anchored in his expansive, artificial and digitized panoramas is a purely formalist abstraction. Diagonal, crisscrossing lines seem familiar, as perhaps, architectural blueprints, but ultimately serves as a structural framework. Giehler breaks the picture plane into contemplative sections of pure color yet the feeling of velocity arises from the skewed, multiple perspectives. For a moment it is easy to spot the faint trails of Mondrian, or Blinky Palermo, but in an instant we are light years away, twisting in a quasar that pulsates the beat of an Audioslave song. It is this speed of information, that Giehler has translated into color, intersected by line, and formatted for reflection.

Torben Giehler is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has been the recipient of the James William Paige Fund as well as a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Scholarship. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, including most recently a solo show at Arndt & Partner, Berlin. He has also had a solo exhibition at Centro de Arte, Salamanca. As well, Torben Giehler’s work has appeared in museum shows such as “Treasure Islands” and “Painting Pictures” at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and “Metascape” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Most recently he was included in the exhibition “The Eclectic Eye: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation”, New Orleans Museum of Art, LA.