Heejo Kim & Markus Baldegger
False Relations
ON VIEW: May 16 - June 22, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, May 16, 2024, 5 - 7 PM
BALTIMORE, MD - C. Grimaldis is pleased to present False Relations, a two-person exhibition of work by Heejo Kim and Markus Baldegger. This survey display of paintings merges swift, gestural marks with thick, curvy figures to showcase unique and lyrical chromatic transitions.
Heejo Kim’s dreamy figurative paintings feel like fragments of a memory, each lived through amorphic, vibrantly molten bodies huddled together in moments of domesticity. Light illuminates, confronts, and sometimes hides portions of narrative, an expression which reveals much about the artist’s experience as a young woman in Seoul and her desire to find comfort and identity in space. Baldegger’s works respond with gesture. Delicate, yet powerful webbed abstractions play with perception as they balance coincidence and deliberate, impasto application by the artist. Baldegger approaches painting cognitively; the aim of his work is not narrative but is reduced rather to the possibilities of color itself.
Yet both Kim and Baldegger seem to tell a story about the familiar, with deep interest in composition, embracing the complexity of color, rhythm, and movement. The title of the show comes from the term defined in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1927) as “the analysis of harmony in two connections. It denotes the occurrence of a chromatic contradiction between two notes of the same cord ... it also describes chromatic contradiction of similar character in two adjacent cords.” As painters, Kim and Baldegger hold many differences in identity and discipline, but within the context of False Relations, they share a melodic candor.
Heejo Kim (b. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) received an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited in the United States and Korea, including C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD), The Peale Museum (Baltimore, MD), Uprise Art Gallery (New York, NY), Art Miami (Miami, FL), and Art Palm Beach (Palm Beach, FL). Kim is currently based in Baltimore, MD.
Markus Baldegger (b. 1947, Altstätten, Switzerland) began painting in the 1980s after attending Art School Cologne (Germany) and since has had an extensive career in Europe with museum exhibitions at the Siegerland Museum (Siegen, Germany), the Leonhardi Museum (Dresden, Germany), and the Daniel-Pöppelmann Museum (Herford, Germany). He is collected by the Kunstmuseum Aarau (Switzerland), Kunstmuseum Chur (Switzerland), and Siegerland Museum Siegen (Germany). Baldegger is now based in Belgium and Germany.
Annette Sauermann & Madeleine Dietz
Earth, Light, Paper, Steel
On View: March 7 - April 13, 2024
Opening Reception: March 7, 2024 6 - 8 PM
BALTIMORE, MD - C. Grimaldis is pleased to present Earth, Light, Paper, Steel, a two-person exhibition of work by German sculptors Annette Sauermann and Madeleine Dietz. This survey display of drawings and wall structures reimagine architectural forms to build new perspectives on abstraction and functionality. The artists last showed together at the Macedonian Museum for Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2011. Their work was brought together in a dialogue concerning materiality and labor. By employing basic raw materials - earth, light, paper, steel - the sculptors bring forward questions of man’s constant desire to construct space, while allowing the viewer to dictate how that space will be navigated.
Sauermann’s translucent acrylic wall sculptures respond to the ambient light in a room. Their rich color creates a luminosity that vibrates through the space in stark contrast to the stoic mixed media drawings of similar form. Dietz’s work responds with texture, disrupting clean geometry with organic, cracked earth. The materials in her sculptures are inherently dichotomous, yet their kindred hard surfaces communicate ideas of decay. Both Sauermann and Dietz consider space to be an integral part of the work; embracing formalism, building tension in materials, balancing the natural and the industrial.
Annette Sauermann (b. 1957, Essan, Germany) studied at the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen, Germany from 1979 to 1986. She has produced recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Linde Hollinger (Ladenburg), Galerie Lausberg (Düsseldorf), Galerie ARTFORUM (Antwerpen, Belgium), and Galerie Claude Samuel (Paris, France). Sauermann is included in many of Germany’s most prominent collections, including the Ludwig Foundation in Aachen, the Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, the Museum Biedermann Art.Plus in Donaueschingen, the Agathe and Maximilian Weidhaupt Collection in Munich, the Schroth Collection in Soest, and the Foundation Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.
Madeleine Dietz was (b. 1953, Mannheim, Germany) has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United states including Galerie Georg Nothelfer (Berlin), Galerie Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX), Museum der Minoriten (Graz), Galerie Linde Holinger (Ladensburg), and Ernst Barlach Museum (Ratzeburg), among others. Her work is in many museums and private collections, including the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Wilhelm - Hack Museum (Ludwigshafen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Neubrandenburg), and the New Museum (Weserburg). She has concurrent exhibitions at Galerie Georg Nothelfer (Berlin) and Galerie Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX).
Earth, Light, Paper, Steel will be on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery from March 7 through April 13, 2024.
