In Gallery II, Goldfinch is excited to announce Sky Hole, our second solo exhibition with Chicago-based painter Andreas Fischer. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 9th from 2-5pm. On Friday, April 12th, from 5-7pm, Goldfinch will host an evening “Meet and Greet” with exhibiting artists Andreas Fischer and Leslie Baum in conjunction with Expo Art Week’s “Art After Hours;” and on Saturday, April 13th at 2pm, Justin Witte, Director and Curator of Cleve Carney Museum of Art at College of DuPage, will moderate a conversation on painting with Andreas Fischer and Leslie Baum.

Sky Hole features new paintings that signal a shift in Andreas Fischer’s thinking about the nature of representation. In earlier bodies of work, including those in his 2021 solo show, And apologies for bringing this up..., Fischer focused on the potential of distortion to alter the descriptive character of representations.  His new work is more invested in what can be felt through his paintings than in what can be read in them.     

Fischer’s sense that a change in tactics was needed in his work has led him to use photography to engage subjects in ways he hadn’t explored before. Importantly, he does not deploy the camera in service of factual documentation but uses it as “a device for emptying…and opening possibilities.” He uses his watercolor studies as beginning steps in “re-assembling” images that spring from his photographs. The studies form the basis of Fischer’s paintings, which he sees as ways to further processes of reconstruction. These generative steps have enabled the artist to discover new ways of building images that function differently from “descriptive representations.”

“I want the material facts of my paintings to be in tension with whatever representational characteristics there are," Fischer explains. "It is easy for description to take over in a drawing or painting—and I think that might tend to be true in life too.  In my work, I want the material and imaginary to bounce back and forth so the experience is not a collection of mostly well-behaved marks that, no matter how ‘expressive,’ ultimately deliver clear content. Instead, I hope for a range of perceptual and psychological features that are different in kind and vibrate with each other. I like what that might suggest.” 

As Fischer sees it, “vibrations” of this kind are capable of creating important connections that battles over representational content might not allow us to sense.

For more information on Andreas Fischer's recent work and thought process, read the interview with the artist conducted by Elizabeth Lalley in conjunction with Sky Hole.

Artist’s Bio:

Andreas Fischer has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Art History from The University of Illinois at Chicago, and attended the Universität der Künste, Berlin.  He has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Goldfinch, Chicago; Slow, Chicago; Boundary, Chicago; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC; Untitled, Miami; Devening Projects, Chicago; Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York; Hungryman Gallery, San Francisco; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Important Projects, Oakland; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Lamontagne Gallery, Boston; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Regina Rex, Brooklyn.

Andreas Fischer: "Sky Hole" features new paintings and watercolor studies that explore the nature of representation.