Jasper Sebastian Stürup, This Year´s Girl

fruehsorge contemporary drawings Heidestrasse 46-52 10557 Berlin Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49 0175 275 12 10 www.fruehsorge.com

"DOT DOT DOT", or also (...), the title of the exhibition describes the main characteristics of the works of the two artists Olivia Seiling (born 1972 in Beckum) and Jasper Sebastian Stürup (born 1969 in Frederiksberg,DK). "DOT DOT DOT" stands for the gap in a text or in this context for the omition of important details of the represented people.

Olivia Seiling's portraits deal with self exploration or with the analysis of mimicy from friends and relatives. She is fascinated, not by strong emotions but by little, spontanous gestures, which she captures before they fade irretrievably. The gestures are minimal and so the drawings that arise are reduced and outlined. They are mainly contours, which reduce the drawing to two-dimensionality. Like this, Seiling extracts single moments out of a complex continuum. Through a specific eliding, the viewer manages to recognize the whole human being in spite of the reduced drawing. Seiling works not only on two dimensional surfaces but also explores the space with her overdimensional portraits on plastic sheeting, which because of its transparency, seems to merge with the room. Her analysis also takes place on video. For example in her video "She proves her interface and marvels over her mimic animation of her interactive surface" Seiling works with a face grid that reminds one of a scientific experimental practice.

Jasper Sebastian Stürup's handling of gaps are more obvious. His figures, which have their source in films and the music scene, principally lack their face. But because of the effect of recognition they seem to be completed. His graceful, accurate lines create compacted fields of lines next to white fields, that substitute the face. Stürup's use of colour is also various and contrastful: sometimes strong colours fill the created fields, sometimes the lines are flooded with light watercolours, through which parts of the figures shine through, sometimes his works are reduced to only line. Stürups' drawings seem like scraps/snatches of memories from dreams, which underly the phenomenon that often facial details escape the memory. This feeling is fortified by the special effects that Stürup creates with colour. Black stains on the drawings stand for the black holes in the otherwise complete context, the blizzard like surroundings stand for strong, insistant memories and the labyrinth like lines which surround the people in some drawings, stand for the feeling of confusion due to the incoherent context of a dream.