David Krippendorff
07/02/2003 - 15/03/2003
Massimo Audiello Gallery
526 West 26th Street No.519
New York, NY 10001
Tel 212.675.9082
Fax 212.675.8680
audiello@msn.com
www.massimoaudiello.com
image: Negative Painting #5, 2001
Oil on canvas, 103 x 75 inches
Massimo Audiello is pleased to present an exhibition of video, painting,
and digital prints by David Krippendorff. The show opens on Friday,
February 7, 2003, and will run through March 15, 2003.
Krippendorff was born in 1967 to a German father and an American mother,
but lived most of his childhood and teenage years in Rome before moving
to Berlin to study art. He now divides his time between New York City and
Berlin. This biographical information is useful for understanding the
poetic his work is built around. The theme running through the various
media in this show is the artist’s fascination with the classic
American film, The Wizard of Oz.
To a young boy hoping to fashion a sense of home out of the fabric of
three different nationalities, Dorothy’s adventure must have
seemed an anchoring promise and a welcome way to participate in a collective
imagination. But the child grows up, and this seemingly unifying fantasy
turns out to be an ominous example of American mythmaking. For these and
other reasons, the cinematic vision has become the seductive raw
material which the artist uses in sensuous and unexpected ways, to investigate
and question accepted notions of home, country and cultural identity.
Krippendorff’s video, “Beyond the moon…,” twists image and color to invert the heroic journey and create a glittering sense of shattered promises.
The dream-like search for a road home is shown to be closer to an
enchanting nightmare. The artist’s large “curtain paintings” displace and disorient the film even further; movie stills become wavelike illusions
of image and light and evocative still lives which offer a stirring sense
of doubt against Hollywood’s over-simplified notions of home. The
glossy sheen of digital photographs continues the strategic duality between
beauty and danger. Cold and seductive, these images play with the allure
of the film’s scenery while at the same time using the material
distance of painting and print to question the value of these myths.
