Tom Waring: A Robot Never Made Me Laugh
Galerie Maria Bernheim is proud to present Tom Waring鈥檚 first solo show with the gallery and in Switzerland. Entitled A Robot Never Made Me Laugh, the exhibition draws upon his traditional surrealist and incongruous motifs on an unparalleled scale.
Waring鈥檚 paintings are based on intricate compositions, meticulously built with art historical references ranging from gothic mythologies to impossible architecture of the 20th century. His oeuvre relies not only on the skillful rendering of these elements, but also on the Musee Imaginaire of the viewer, where those references suddenly take on a life of their own, their post Dada association forcing us to imagine a world seldom theirs. It is precisely this in between moment, this subconscious passage way that the exhibition points to, this place that Waring creates through receding planes, multiple panels connected like altar pieces, through giant objects and architectural elements crammed into the smallest squares, questioning the very core of how we think but also how we envisage space.
As the artist notes, our cognitive ability to transcend data and make leaps, when for instance combing images, or viewing an image in a different context is what makes us human. In our holistic human perception, we are able to make this jump through the things and derive more of each of them. Humor is a great example of this transversal cognitive act and the title of the exhibition refers to a written sign a screenwriter was holding in a strike in Hollywood over the impact of AI on their livelihoods.
Reflecting upon this semiotic issue, the artist explores the ancestral motif of the chair, recurring in multiple paintings, they become an anchor, an instantly recognizable element that throws off the viewer as an absurd and surrealist image around which the work is centered. Recently, the notion of chair has been used in robot development and artificial recognition to test whether recognition had been achieved or not by a robot: the result is that its concept has been very difficult to formulate into a robot's programming.
How do you differentiate between anything else with a flat top and 4 legs? Is a chair a table or a turtle?
In this De Chiricoesque atmosphere, paint is not only imaginary, the uncanny lingers, gargoyles hide under chairs, stairs lead to nowhere and we are left with a sense of uneasiness that surpasses the beauty of the craft.
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Galerie Maria Bernheim is proud to present Tom Waring鈥檚 first solo show with the gallery and in Switzerland. Entitled A Robot Never Made Me Laugh, the exhibition draws upon his traditional surrealist and incongruous motifs on an unparalleled scale.
Waring鈥檚 paintings are based on intricate compositions, meticulously built with art historical references ranging from gothic mythologies to impossible architecture of the 20th century. His oeuvre relies not only on the skillful rendering of these elements, but also on the Musee Imaginaire of the viewer, where those references suddenly take on a life of their own, their post Dada association forcing us to imagine a world seldom theirs. It is precisely this in between moment, this subconscious passage way that the exhibition points to, this place that Waring creates through receding planes, multiple panels connected like altar pieces, through giant objects and architectural elements crammed into the smallest squares, questioning the very core of how we think but also how we envisage space.
As the artist notes, our cognitive ability to transcend data and make leaps, when for instance combing images, or viewing an image in a different context is what makes us human. In our holistic human perception, we are able to make this jump through the things and derive more of each of them. Humor is a great example of this transversal cognitive act and the title of the exhibition refers to a written sign a screenwriter was holding in a strike in Hollywood over the impact of AI on their livelihoods.
Reflecting upon this semiotic issue, the artist explores the ancestral motif of the chair, recurring in multiple paintings, they become an anchor, an instantly recognizable element that throws off the viewer as an absurd and surrealist image around which the work is centered. Recently, the notion of chair has been used in robot development and artificial recognition to test whether recognition had been achieved or not by a robot: the result is that its concept has been very difficult to formulate into a robot's programming.
How do you differentiate between anything else with a flat top and 4 legs? Is a chair a table or a turtle?
In this De Chiricoesque atmosphere, paint is not only imaginary, the uncanny lingers, gargoyles hide under chairs, stairs lead to nowhere and we are left with a sense of uneasiness that surpasses the beauty of the craft.
Artists on show
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Galerie Maria Bernheim is proud to present Tom Waring鈥檚 first solo show with the gallery and in Switzerland.
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