Hank Schmidt in der Beek / Group XXV, Oct 07 - Mar 08

AH CA VA BIEN

3/7/08 to 3/9/08

MAK Center for Art and Architecture L.A at the Schindler House, 835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA

Hank Schmidt in der Beek presented a series of large-scale paintings produced using a system of automated painting. To execute the paintings, in der Beek projected a movie or television show onto a blank canvas and captured as much as possible with his paintbrush as the projection ran. The resulting abstract paintings were exhibited along with films made to document the process. In der Beek also used this method to present “re-colorations” of black-and-white movies. These films (classics from the silent-movie period, as well as color-movies that he himself transformed into black-and-white movies by simply switching the colours out of them) were colorized and afterwards projected onto the same (now painted) canvas, so that the film – with some liberal imagination – could be seen in it's colorized version. The final exhibition showed the colorations which could be regarded as autonomous abstract pictures, or as tools to see a certain movie in it's colorized version, strictly bonded to that movie.