Gildar Gallery is pleased to present Dmitri Obergfell's first solo exhibition, Yinfinity running from October 10 - November 8, 2014. In this body of work the artist revives familiar images of reverence as contemporary objects of pop and awe. With sources as diverse as cartography, astronomy, car culture, rap music, and figures from classical antiquity, Obergfell continues to draw a common thread through cultural history, creating works that attempt to touch the core of the human psyche. Working through conceptual constructs including the transcendent, the historic, and the sublime, he has taken the archeological and transformed it into candy coated paintings and sculptures that glorify the transience of life through confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration and pure spectacle.
From the twin-faced Latin god Janus looking at once into the past and the future, to its far eastern Yin Yang counterpart displaying intertwined energetic duality, Obergfell traces a visual line between discreet symbols imbued with spiritual meaning that have transcended their initial religious context. Other universal symbols, such as the human skeleton, the moon, and a predicted pangea, evoke a similar if not perhaps even more diffuse sense of this apotheosis. After generations of countless assimilations and perversions these images remain now as uprooted placeholders of import, equally suited for use in bumper stickers, corporate logos and fashion accessories.
Any remaining historical identifiers embedded in these icons are subsumed by glass-like coats of two-toned Chameleon automotive paint. These once varied symbols transform into a highly cohesive set of shimmering global objects. The resulting refracting sculptural works immediately call out to be captured and shared in the social media-scape, while the shifting nature of their gradient surfaces resists accurate documentation and this digital cycle of instant archiving and memory loss. It is this tension between a shifting surface as a flattener of history and a requirement of experience that literally glosses over these symbols' origins while equipping them for the fierce competition among modern spectacles. By replacing the patina of history with an iridescent sheen, Obergfell resurrects icons that span geographies and timelines, retrofitting them to shine anew in the age of the relentless image.
About the Artist
Dmitri Obergfell is a multimedia artist who regularly draws upon both historical and contemporary motifs to explore fundamental human constructs. He received his BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and is currently a resident artist at RedLine Denver. His work has been exhibited domestically in Denver, Houston, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles as well as internationally in, Italy and the Czech Republic.
