Secret Mechanisms | Brigitta Kocsis + Unfortunate Creatures | Kevin Friedrich

Artist talk: Sat April 28th, 4pm, in conjunction with the Vancouver Gallery Hop (www.canadianart.ca/galleryhop)

Gallery Gachet is delighted to present the solo exhibitions of Brigitta Kocsis and Kevin Friedrich. Both artists communicate a sense of modern-day anxiety within our cultural framework. Secret Mechanisms depicts a series of characters created with multi-part anatomical and technological allusions; like dysfunctional poetic super-heroes in a contemporary comic strip. Friedrich’s body of work takes a slightly dark, yet humorous look at the human condition in response to over-mechanization and fast-obscelescence.

Brigitta Kocsis’s art explores the space between figuration and abstraction; the focus is on investigating the shifting concepts of the human body and its environment. The graphic images are painted in a layered, collage-like style combined with painterly expressions. Contemporary discoveries in anatomical technologies have profoundly changed how one perceives the human body. Secret Mechanisms explores how technology can alter perception by interacting with the methods and processes involved in how the human body works. In Kocsis’ work, a series of characters is created with a specific “trade” or “trait” assigned to each character. These figures are like actors and depict a kind of repulsive contemporary beauty where science fiction and artificial body parts are no longer fiction. The tension contained within the bodies of the characters due to the pervasive technologies communicates a sense of contemporary environment in its fractured state.

Friedrich’s body of work, Unfortunate Creatures: under-planned, over-painted, moves away from the over-planned process of creation and shifts towards the immediacy of gut impulses which, in Friedrich’s mind, offer up an inherently fresh and honest visual statement. Elements of prairie life arise with images such as soft landscapes juxtaposed against clumsy, inefficient machines. This reflection of the human condition showcases human vulnerability and perpetual anxieties and often direct ones thoughts inwards.  Through distance and life experience his ‘neat little package’ understanding of the world has evolved.  Life’s balance of contrasts are seen in the paradoxes of construction vs. dilapidation, growth vs. deterioration and low tech vs. high tech.  A detectable line of progression is not present and instead there is a mish-mash of art history, placement and displacement.

Kevin Friedrich | Untitled

Brigitta Kocsis was born in Hungary. She moved to the UK and learned English in Brixton and after two years there, relocated to Montreal to pursue her education at Concordia University Fine Arts. In 2005, she received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and since 1994 lives and works in Vancouver, BC. She is a recipient of a Canada Council Assistance to Visual Artists – Project Grant in 2010 and spent 5 months researching and creating in Paris and Berlin. She has also received a Canada Council Assistance to Visual Artists – Travel Grant and just returned from Geneva, Switzerland where she was invited to participate in the MAC-11 Geneva Art Biennale.
Brigitta Kocsis
http://www.b–k.ca/

Kevin Friedrich was born in Meadowlake Saskatchewan and attended his first 2 years of art school at Red Deer College before completing his BFA in painting at the U of M and making his permanent home in Winnipeg. Kevin’s work has been described as ‘Prairie Surrealism’ and includes an evolving repertoire of personal symbols and styles. Through many stylistic avenues, such as folk and absurdist, his paintings give rise to charismatically inconclusive statements that are engaging and highly thought provoking.
Kevin Friedrich
http://www.kevinfriedrich.ca

Made possible through the generous support of the City of Winnipeg through the Winnipeg Arts Council, and the Manitoba Arts Council.

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157629941738809