udomsak krisanamis - light my way

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

neugerriemschneider is proud to host light my way, Udomsak Krisanamis’ first exhibition with the gallery. For over 30 years, Krisanamis has led an artistic pursuit marked by a versatile openness to media and its employ. Venturing beyond the traditional constraints of paint and canvas, he crafts works that integrate vestiges of the real world into abstracted sceneries. Materials such as noodles supplement acrylics or oils, and are methodically deposited upon surfaces ranging from newsprint to bedsheets and plywood to shape nonhierarchical compositions. His presentation in Berlin continues this approach with recent works produced in his Chiang Mai studio, each of which encapsulate the essence of the artist’s ethos and expand it to new extents.

Krisanamis’ images grow from a career-spanning use of collaged, selectively obscured textual excerpts in which letterforms, numbers or their remainders sit at the bases of his paintings, providing foundations for layered, densely populated, mesmerizing visions. Upon arriving to the United States in the early 1990s as a young art student, he not only immersed himself in the canon of American abstraction, but began to teach himself English by reading newspapers, crossing out words that he knew and looking up those he did not. Segmented drawings began to emerge. Written language was sacrificed and reconstituted as a visual one - a tactic maintained to this day, whereby patterned fields of built-up material turn into arrangements that actively reject narrative in favor of an improvisatory artistic mode. Unbound by painterly mores or expectations, the artist’s ecosystems redirect perspective and reimagine depth, flattening and constructing space anew, freezing dynamic motion in place. The works develop organically, molded by a clarity of intent and complemented by a non-linear, extemporaneous method. The result is akin to a matrix of pictorial codes - indeterminate ciphers that decrypt as tools for free interpretation or open-ended invitations to exploration and discovery.

Intuitive meditations on existence between the tangible and the symbolic pervade light my way, showcasing Krisanamis’ unfettered integration of his diverse sources. The exhibition’s eponymous work, Light My Way (2024), features strips of newspaper that link to span its height and width, and stands as exemplary of the artist’s engagement with the typeset word and its negation. Blacked-out sections that leave just the letters’ hollows exposed meet scattered patches of bold color, while the purple ground that lies below the converging, pasted-on lines subtly makes its presence known through happenstance gaps. Atop it are duplicated circular rings of paint, the traces of which recur in Sea Treasure (2024) as a pair of cutouts. Here, the work’s stretcher bars become exposed through Krisanamis’ action, affording a glance through the blue and black stripes that traverse the work’s surface, and allowing its typically unseen physical structure to double as a compositional one. His gouache-on-canvas So Long Farewell (2024), conversely, foregoes a wooden subframe altogether, presenting instead as a draped banner. A single ornamented letter repeats and rotates, its alphabetical role ceded to its aesthetic utility in a development of Krisanamis’ linguistic reassessments. By his hand, moments are captured, woven and stretched, transmuted and filtered through their interpreter before materializing on the other side of familiarity, leaving a fusion of life and artmaking to be unearthed and unraveled.

The work of Udomsak Krisanamis (b. 1966) has been the subject of international solo and group exhibitions including those at 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok (2023); Bangkok University Gallery, Bangkok (2019); The National Art Center and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017); CMU Art Center, Chiang Mai (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2015); Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2012); Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg (2011); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2009); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2008); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2003); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2003); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2000); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998). Krisanamis lives and works in Chiang Mai.

For further press information and imagery, please contact Jonathan Friedrich Stockhorst: +49 30 288 77277 or jonathan@neugerriemschneider.com