Paper Products: June 2-25, 2016

Klaus Hartmann & Reiner Mahrlein: Kaiserslautern Calling, April 18 - May 11, 2014

 For more information, 
CLICK HERE.

For a preview
CLICK HERE.

Columbia/Kaiserslautern: The International (Mural) Project, October 5-16, 2012

BIO Reiner Mahrlein

Reiner Mahrlein (left)
with Silvia Rudolf and Klaus Hartmann

Reiner Mährlein (b. 1959)

German artist Reiner Mährlein is a widely acclaimed artist in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where he has completed several large public sculptures. He is part of a regular cultural exchange between artists from Columbia and its German sister city, Kaiserslautern, where the artist lives and works. Mährlein studied art at the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts and at the Ecole Nationale Superieur de Beaux-Arts in Paris. He has been in solo and group exhibitions and has participated in exchanges throughout Germany and the rest of Europe as well as the United States and Argentina. His work is in several public collections in France and Germany, including that of his hometown’s main museum of fine art, the Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.   

Salon III: January 15- February 4, 2009

For exhibition preview, click here.

For installation images, click here.

For printmaking demonstration schedule, click here.

Variation IV, 2006
Steel and granite embossing, 1/1
19 x 12 in.
$ 675

if ART Gallery

presents

SALON III: The Print Exhibition

January 15 – February 4, 2009

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C. 29205

Reception: Thursday, Jan. 15, 5 – 10 p.m.

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Printmaking Demonstrations:

Sunday, Jan. 18, 3 – 5 p.m., Marcelo Novo, Print Gocco

Sunday, Jan. 25, 3 – 5 p.m., Phil Garrett, Monotype

Saturday, Jan. 31, 3 – 5 p.m., H. Brown Thornton, Photo Transfer

Sunday, Feb. 1, 3 – 5 p.m., Steven Chapp, Linocut & Photopolymer Prints

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its January 2009 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents Salon III, an exhibition of prints by gallery artists at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C. The opening reception will be Thursday, January 15, 2009, 5 – 10 p.m. The exhibition will be installed salon-style at the gallery’s first floor and continues if ART’s salon-style exhibitions; in December 2008, Salon I & II took place simultaneously at the gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia.

Among the printmaking techniques represented in the exhibition are etchings, dry points, lithographs, woodcuts, linocuts, photopolymer prints, embossings, monotypes, silkscreens and photo transfers.

During the exhibition, gallery artists Steven Chapp of Easley, S.C., Phil Garrett of Greenville, S.C., Brown Thornton of Aiken, S.C., and Marcelo Novo of Columbia will give demonstrations of various printmaking techniques. For times and demonstrated techniques, see above.

Artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, John Hultberg, Richard Hunt, Sjaak Korsten, Lucebert, Reiner Mährlein, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Joan Mitchell, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Hannes Postma, Edward Rice, Anton Rooskens, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Brown Thornton, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, David Yaghjian and Paul Yanko.

if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

&

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Open Christmas Eve until 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its December 2008 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents The Salon I & II, an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations: if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. On Thursday, December 11, 2008, 5 – 10 p.m., if ART will hold opening receptions at both locations. The ifART Walk will be on Lady and Lincoln Streets, between both locations, which are around the corner from each other.

The exhibitions will present art by if ART Gallery artists, installed salon-style at both Gallery 80808 and if ART. Artists in the exhibitions include two new additions to if ART Gallery, Columbia ceramic artist Renee Rouillier and the prominent African-American collage and mixed-media artist Sam Middleton, an 81-year-old expatriate who has lived in the Netherlands since the early 1960s.

Other artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Aaron Baldwin, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Stephen Chesley, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, Jerry Harris, Bill Jackson, Sjaak Korsten, Peter Lenzo, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Matt Overend, Anna Redwine, Paul Reed, Edward Rice, Silvia Rudolf, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Tom Stanley, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Leo Twiggs, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, Mike Williams, David Yaghjian, Paul Yanko and Don Zurlo.

Essay: Reiner Mährlein

Variation IV, 2006

Steel and granite embossing, 1/1

19 x 12 in.

$ 675

REINER MÄHRLEIN

By Wim Roefs

Reiner Mährlein mostly uses steel, granite and paper, the first two for his sculptures, all three for his prints. From these basic, somewhat raw materials, he makes smart, elegant, beautiful works of art. Interaction between mass and openness, weight and lightness, flatness and three-dimensional space and organic and constructed qualities characterizes much of his work. “These materials and the relationship between them,” Mährlein says, “create spatial tension -- a contest, as it were, between conflict and togetherness.”

“In many of my sculptures, the interaction between the three-dimensional objects made from welded flat steel plates and the stones’ mass creates varying spatial and architectural environments.” Little Cube III and IV in the current exhibition are small-scale models of such sculptures, many of which Mährlein has turned into large public sculptures in Germany. “In these situations,” Mährlein says, “the steel plates, because of their particular properties, keep their flat-surface qualities, which is accentuated by the linear, often frame-like patterns of the welded seams. The stone mass, on the other hand, with its rough surface and relief structure, always intervenes in the space.”

In his small, all-bronze cubes such as Inside II and IV, Mährlein maintains the interaction between mass and openness and heaviness and lightness, but the weight shifts. Instead of a solid piece of stone intervening in the center space of a steel construction, thin sheets or fluttering flakes of bronze occupy the sculptures’ airy center. Almost by default, the legs and bars making up the cubes’ external skeletal structure gain in weight.

In Blues and Pfluge (Plough), two larger sculptures that Mährlein created in Columbia in 2003, the flatness of steel plates is missing. Instead, beams represent the steel element, not creating space for granite to intervene in but itself intervening in space with the granite. “I worked with whatever materials I had,” Mährlein says, “and adjusted my concept while still working with granite and steel.”

In many of Mährlein’s sculptures, granite typically provides the solid, heavy mass. In his prints, on the other hand, granite – or, rather, its imprint – provides the light touch, even a sense of floating, while simultaneously still providing a three-dimensional element to an otherwise two-dimensional work of art. His prints are part rust prints, from pressing metal plates onto the paper, and part embossing, the result of pressing wet paper onto stone surfaces. 

The procedure creates abstract works with a rich and rough, architectural quality in which the imprint of the steel and the embossing from the stone interact much as both materials do in Mährlein’s sculpture. “The three-dimensionality of the prints is not just suggested through linear patterns, surface, and color values,” Mährlein says. “The embossed paper actually intervenes in a sculptural fashion in the surroundings.”

March 2008