HANS BROEK

October 25–December 8, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 25 6–8 pm

Newman Popiashvili Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of Dutch painter Hans BroekThe exhibition features five large-scale oil paintings from Broek’s latest body of work.

Broek’s work reconsiders iconic images from two distinct art forms – classical painting and twentieth-century cinema. There is a déjà-vu experience when viewing these paintings, but the breadth of the source material allows the viewer to re-examine familiar works without the initial burden of history.

An underlying theme of the show is the everlasting and universal quandary of mankind. As Dr. Jennie Hirsh has written on Broek’s paintings: “Self-consciously imprecise copies of compositions that are to a greater and lesser extents readily recognizable, his paintings abstract the political, sexual and biological drives that underline all human behavior in his signature pictorial language infused with topical themes such as death, desire and destruction.”

Juxtaposing Broek’s Party, a reconsideration of Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (c.1523), and Sex, a key scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the ever-present condition of lust and desire is revealed. Broek historicizes voyeurism and heterosexual male gaze by connecting past and present in these two paintings.

The Hunt and Monica Hunting are two works based on the scenes from the same movie – Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1968 film adaptation of Leo Toltoy’s War and Peace. In these works Broek is reinterpreting an already adapted work – from book to film to painting. Both scenes are painted in sepia palette that makes these five by seven feet images look like monumental studies for a mural. Monica Hunting is full of restrained potential energy, the heroine is frozen in a reflective moment during a hunt, while The Hunt is its antidote – rapturous wide brushstrokes nearly obliterate and erase the narrative content of the scene.

Hans Broek has concurrent solo shows with Tanya Rumpff and Torch galleries in the Netherlands.

The exhibition is accompanied with a catalog.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11am – 6pm.

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