Jack Hanley Gallery is delighted to present the first solo exhibition with Berlin based artist Isabelle Fein who works in various media blurring the lines between painting and drawing. The exhibition features new figurative works on board, canvas and paper as well as painted ceramic plates and sculptures.
Isabelle Fein’s paintings depict simple observations of the artist’s everyday life and surroundings: a bird sitting on a wire, a snail crossing the sidewalk, a woman holding on to an umbrella in the rain or a stranger reading the newspaper on the tram. Transferred into dream-like settings, Fein creates sceneries of landscapes, people, animals, plants and objects in which inner and outer life coexist. Through her curiosity and awareness for details and situations, Fein pays equal attention to each object and figure. Her non-traditional compositions reject any hierarchical order or chronology and inhere a sense of ease and freedom.
This freedom is also visible in her use of materials and technique. Whether painterly brushstrokes of oil on board, fine contoured lines on ceramic plates or soft layers of india ink on canvas, what unifies Fein’s visual vocabulary is the joy to experiment. This playful latitude is paired with a tranquility and meditativeness found in her figure’s characters. Often presented isolated from each other, abstracted and lost in thought, they exist in their own time and space.
In small scale ceramic sculptures these characters seem to have escaped the borders of the two-dimensional and expand Fein’s arcane realities.
Isabelle Fein (born 1973 in Wiesbaden, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She studied film and drawing at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany and the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt and Fort Gansevoort Gallery, New York. The artist also participated in exhibitions at Center Berlin, Acud Project Space and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, DE.