Michael Alan. Collapsible Anatomy

Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert are pleased to present their second solo exhibition of Michael Alan.

Collapsible Anatomy is a celebration of the universal condition: beauty, delicacy, strength and change. Assembling unusual and unique visual connections, it’s an exclamation of life at its strongest and most vulnerable state. This exhibition examines our deceptive frailty by exploring the relationship between emotional states and the physical body: how our feelings are reflected by our forms. The result is presented as an architectural, animated image. The combination of technique creates the illusion of volume and depth – by showing the inner workings, the guts and the worlds within us. Collapsible Anatomy is about the ways in which the corporeal manifests into emotional states and the intangible influences physical reality.

Alan’s images are tenuous support systems, counterweighted with vibrant bursts of passage hoops, splashes and connections. Unseen lines, dashes and a dictionary of mark-making language moves and morphs across the plane, emboldened by various layers, media, line work and technique. Alan builds up the surface with a marriage of smudges and marks that are tied together by his signature line work. The resulting forms and bodies express movement, captured in that second, they are the structure and the root of the paintings. Body parts and their “order” are re-imagined, and working with layers, watercolor, line work, faces, shapes, worlds, language, movement, destruction, and an army of images, perceptible volume and a stereoscopic image bursts forth. Michael Alan uses lines to enliven and animate haunted forms. Collapsible Anatomy gives shape to the soul that crashes around in our rib cage.

Like fragile lacework, each piece shimmers and recedes, leaving traces of itself while simultaneously commanding the plane. The complement and contrast between the monochrome line drawings and bright, furtive large works holds the key to Alan’s intentionally mysterious technique. The repetition of the lines is a language rather than a pattern. Collapsible Anatomy is delicate yet ferocious, but always, constantly, mutable.

Michael Alan
Collapsible Anatomy