Parker’s Box Sunday Supper Salon

Stefan Sehler and Michael Woody

July 27, 2014

Parker’s Box Sunday Supper Salon is a new initiative that will take place from time to time and will present art work in a live streamed event taking place at an unknown location.

The challenge of this, the first Supper Salon of its kind, was to present two quite subtle abstract paintings via online video, with all of the graininess and possible pixelization that this entails. This very fact steered some of the discussion – from the happily ever-present need to be in the presence of the art object for which online representation will never suffice, to attempts to convey the subtleties of the works via the spoken word!

Livestream edited highlights coming soon!

The work of Berlin-based painter, Stefan Sehler, (born 1958 in Nuremberg) has, of course, long been followed by Parker’s Box as the gallery organized four solo exhibitions of his work in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2012 as well as inclusion in numerous group shows and Art Fair showings. We witnessed his progression from conventional canvas to the application of paint behind Plexiglas, (to be viewed from behind and in reverse), as well as his recent transition to what appears to be a completely abstract motif, from his earlier mountains, foliage and marshland representations. The suggestion of photography (at first sight) in all of these works, on the other hand, has never left him despite certain American commentators describing his work as using the exact same technique as Jules Olitski, only seen from the back!

Whereas Stefan Sehler has painstakingly developed his painting practice with intense dedication, concentration and research over a number of decades, Michael Woody (born 1976, in Vicksburg, Mississippi) has developed his own almost monochrome abstract painting practice much more recently, after delving into many other mediums and techniques, including video, photography and sound. The influence of this experience on his current attention to painted surfaces is intriguing to say the least, and provides a most interesting contrast to what, at first sight, might not seem to be wholly different preoccupations to his German counterpart. Both artists have invested great attention in the smallest differences in surface effects in their paintings, and while Sehler seeks to heighten this by frustrating the viewer’s access to some extent via his Plexiglas technique, Woody has used various methods to subtly modify his surfaces with brushwork, spraying, sanding etc. Sehler’s careful shepherding of heavy-bodied acrylic medium creates the suggestion of floating mass, not totally dissimilar to Woody’s painting a small number of discs on his ground, punctuating the surface, while at the same time consolidating its presence. The more we consider these respective painting practices, the more the feeling of opening a can of worms appears, with the increasing suspicion that the description of both paintings as “grey monochromes” may turn out to be the full extent of their similarity!