Carolyn Case
Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present Carolyn Case & Jens Schubert, a two-person exhibition of paintings and prints. Each artist combines an omnivorous interest in symbolic systems derived from ancient, contemporary, and religious iconography with rigorous technique. Case, American-born, has studied and travelled in multiple cultures, and found inspiration in Indian miniature painting, Andean textiles, Persian palaces, and trans-cultural conceptions of mortality and the afterlife. Schubert, a young German artist, similarly points to the ubiquity and perpetuity of signs and symbols as they reappear across time, and today in music, video games, anime, fashion and other forms of pop culture.
Case’s paintings, while intimate in scale, present grand universes of limitless space, overlapped by areas of teeming detail, such as tiny dots on stalactite-like drips. Flat silhouettes of ancient urns and vases float through each painting. Schubert’s graphic linocuts of overlapping geometry and repeated images explode with color, pattern, and texture. His series “Realms of Heaven” explores the different meanings and associations of heaven and sky, starting with the premise that in German, the word is the same for both “sky” and “heaven”. Schubert’s series of unique prints explore the traces of old myths within our current imagination, while disrupting the desire for narrative.
Schubert and Case strategically confound and even erase the specific national or cultural origin of each inspiration in order to create a post-modern quilt of imagery. Each artist travels far to get to a personal place where, as suggested by cultural thinkers such as Robert Campbell or Carl Jung, we can each access a subconsciously embedded understanding of basic archetypes.
Carolyn Case lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Originally from California, Carolyn Case earned her MFA from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD, and her BFA from California State University in Long Beach, CA. She has shown throughout the Mid-Atlantic area, with solo exhibitions at Loyola University, McLean Projects for the Arts, and The Art Registry in Washington D.C. She has also participated in two-person and group exhibitions at Joyce Goldstein Gallery, John Fonda Gallery, and the Delaware Museum of Art. Residencies include the School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kanoria Art Center in Ahmedabad, India. Case’s works are featured in the Spring 2013 New American Paintings, and have been reviewed in the Baltimore Sun.
Jens Schubert was born in 1983 in Schwarzenberg, Germany, and lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, and has had solo exhibitions with Mewo Art Gallery, Memmingen, M2A Gallery, Dresden, and Bongout Gallery, Berlin, among others. Group exhibitions include Instituto de Artes Gráficas, Oaxaca, Mexico, the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Museum of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig, and Biksady Gallery, Budapest. His work has been exhibited at the Volta Art Fair, NY, and the Preview Art Fair, Berlin, in 2012, and in 2011 he received the Marion Ermer Prize.