NYTimes 2002


	Torben Giehler

	NEWS PAINTINGS 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 DRAWINGS PRINTS INSTALLATION BIO PRESS TEXT CATALOGUE CONTACT EMAIL


			ART IN REVIEW; Torben Giehler By ROBERTA SMITH Published: October 4, 2002 Leo Koenig Inc. 249 Centre Street Lower Manhattan Torben Giehler is one of several young painters working in the overlap of formalist abstraction, digital cartography and photography, exploring an illusionistic style that seems indebted to Al Held (who served as éminence grise in a four-artist painting exhibition at P.S. 1 this summer that has now morphed into a large show of Mr. Held's recent work). In his second solo show, Mr. Giehler has beefed up his paintings with jumpier colors, slightly thicker surfaces and tighter, more varied compositions. Fashioned from bright shapes, zooming lines and tilting planes that must require hours of applying masking tape, these works dazzle the eye with their careering video-game sense of space and structure. Sometimes we look down through one patchwork plane to several others; sometimes they are stacked in front of us, accordion-style. In two especially impressive works, ''Lhotse'' and ''K2-North Spur,'' the shapes alone coalesce into jagged mountain peaks that seem to have erupted from checkerboard floors. Mr. Giehler has strong, less purely formal competition: Franz Ackermann, Jim Lambie, Sarah Morris, Benjamin Edwards, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie, for example. But the idea that space is still, or once again, the final frontier in painting enlivens his work, as it does theirs. ROBERTA SMITH

	back