The Art of Digital

digital online only In an all digital exhibition ONLINE ONLY at

www.catherineahnellgallery.com we are presenting digitally created art work by artists including: KESH, Ahn Sun Mi, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou and LMDLDZR_ZeeR. Digital printing which made its entry in the 60’s, has been a game changer for digital art. That said digital art today doesn’t necessarily come as an art piece you can touch and hold, but can be expressed through mediums such as video, projections, and sound etcetera.

With digital art and the digital evolution came the possibility to digitally manipulate an image and with endless possibilities to create within just one image. Adobe released its photo-editing software Photoshop in 1990 and since then digital editing of photos has often been referred to as photoshopping. When we launched the digital artist KESH’s first solo exhibition in New York 2015 she decided to present a hybrid of digital prints and photos as well as projections of her own digital process. The digitally manipulated photo landscape she created on her laptop was printed on large scale plexiglas squares. During the opening, visual projections were projected onto the plexiglas pieces and the wall at the same time as the color of the light in the room created a specific atmosphere within the gallery space. In an article by Lars O Ericsson based on the anthology "Painting beyond itself – the medium in the post-medium condition"” (Sternberg Press, 2016), he describes how the art of painting went through a crises 30 years ago which revolutionized how we see art and lead to a broader view and acceptance of the art forms. The anthology is based on texts from a conference at Harvard 2013 which included theoreticians, art historians, and artists such as Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether and Benjamin Buchloh. Lars O Ericsson writes: ” The crises wasn'’t all about a crise around a certain type of materials or techniques (oil, acrylic, aquarelle etc.), but about the the modernistic ideology that has dominated painting since the Second World War. An ideology that is characterized by mainly four dogmas: Clean genres (painting should be clean, not tainted by other genres), reductionism (painting should be reduced to color on a two dimension surface), hierarchy (painting was seen as the highest form of artistic expression), evolutionism (the historical goal for painting was to develop towards a greater abstraction). After the crises the need to divide art into different genres did no longer exist and had been replaced by it’s opposite: Hybrids and crossovers between all kinds of genres and mediums from photo and painting, to sculpture, writing and video and so on. The art of painting was no longer the ultimate art form but a medium amongst others. Today digital art can be seen as an evident art form and a natural reflection of our technical society in general. From painted art to digital art, another recent exhibition that puts focus on digital art and new technical techniques could be seen in ”The Dream Of Forms” at Palais Tokyo in Paris June 14 to September 10: The artists and researchers who have been brought together in “The Dream of Forms” at Palais de Tokyo testify to their encounter with the new possibilities of representation, derived from recent scientific and technological discoveries, which shake up our way of seeing and showing. By renewing in this way the field of the perceptible–with nanotechnology, synthetic images, 3D scans, stereolithography etc.–these new visualisations hint at as yet unknown geometries. The Catherine Ahnell Gallery online exhibition DIGITAL presents the following artists:

KESH As one of the most relevant young female artists of today KESH works digitally with an array of mediums. She uses digital techniques that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. Integrating social media as part of her work KESH is always on the frontline of the most relevant platforms of the moment, pushing the envelope as an artist representative of our time. KESH was recently featured as the emerging artist of the week by Artsy.

AHN SUN MI Ahn Sun Mi’s work consists of conceptual photo collages where all photos are taken by the artist. By revealing her own fears, viewers are invited to reflect on their fragility and inner landscapes of imagination. Ahn Sun Mi’s work manages to exist on the sidelines of time observing us as we constantly visit our childhood to source references and evolve as human beings in relation to our surroundings. Ahn Sun Mi’s interest in philosophy and early passion for animation transmits through her work. Discovering the work of Rene Magritte gave her the final push to develop her work in the surrealistic direction that it is recognized for today.

MEHDI-GEORGES LAHLOU Through manipulated photos, sculpture and performance art Mehdi-Georges Lahlou challenges our expectations of the body, nudity, sexuality, gender and culture. As in the art performance where he walked 18.5 miles in his signature red heels between two art galleries in different cities or when he is praying on a Muslim prayer rug in the same heels as in his performance ”The Call”. Inevitably, his work can be perceived as controversial and provocative, but rather than having a political agenda, he aims to create ambiguity and to study its limits. He uses simple gestures and modifications to generate complex readings in the mind of the viewer.

LMDLDZR_ZeeR Acknowledged and analyzed by the Parisians the development and aesthetic of the French artist LMDLDZR_ZeeR is closely connected to his career as a graphic designer. Occupying space but never imposing a message whether on a building wall, a billboard or in a gallery space, LMDLDZR_ZeeR’s visual language is consciously placed in unpredictable places or hidden from the general range of vision. A creative bug in our everyday environment; a coded communication with an anonymous sender.