Artists

Udomsak Krisanamis

Press release

neugerriemschneider is proud to host light my way, Udomsak Krisanamis’ first exhibition with the gallery. For over 30 years, Krisanamis has led an artistic pursuit marked by a versatile openness to media and its employ. Venturing beyond the traditional constraints of paint and canvas, he crafts works that integrate vestiges of the real world into abstracted sceneries. Materials such as noodles supplement acrylics or oils, and are methodically deposited upon surfaces ranging from newsprint to bedsheets and plywood to shape nonhierarchical compositions. His presentation in Berlin continues this approach with recent works produced in his Chiang Mai studio, each of which encapsulate the essence of the artist’s ethos and expand it to new extents.

Krisanamis’ images grow from a career-spanning use of collaged, selectively obscured textual excerpts in which letterforms, numbers or their remainders sit at the bases of his paintings, providing foundations for layered, densely populated, mesmerizing visions. Upon arriving to the United States in the early 1990s as a young art student, he not only immersed himself in the canon of American abstraction, but began to teach himself English by reading newspapers, crossing out words that he knew and looking up those he did not. Segmented drawings began to emerge. Written language was sacrificed and reconstituted as a visual one - a tactic maintained to this day, whereby patterned fields of built-up material turn into arrangements that actively reject narrative in favor of an improvisatory artistic mode. Unbound by painterly mores or expectations, the artist’s ecosystems redirect perspective and reimagine depth, flattening and constructing space anew, freezing dynamic motion in place. The works develop organically, molded by a clarity of intent and complemented by a non-linear, extemporaneous method. The result is akin to a matrix of pictorial codes - indeterminate ciphers that decrypt as tools for free interpretation or open-ended invitations to exploration and discovery.