Daniel Pitín: Crystal Gardens
It’s with great pleasure that GRIMM announces ‘Crystal Gardens’, the first solo exhibition in Amsterdam by Czech painter Daniel Pitín. Pitín (Prague, 1977) will exhibit a group of new works in our gallery on the Frans Halsstraat, running from June 9th until July 15th, 2017.
Pitín’s work can be read as fragments of narratives and dreams through which he explores the “personal and collective memory of known places.” Principles formulating his painterly work are also manifested through the media of collage, video, and film. Found material plays an essential role in this process, encompassing the family archive and as well as internet sources, historic film material (specifically with references to the work of Alfred Hitchcock), film noir and Czech new wave films from the 1960s. His interest shifts between humanity and its creation, between structures and their content.
Pitín creates visually complex paintings with thick imagery and subtle references to canonical art works, architecture and aesthetics of late mod- ernism, while using techniques known to history of art from baroque painting to its reconfiguration
by the language of avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. The dark scale of his palette, etheric figures and surreal structures, which are simultaneously hiding and revealing its actors, is filling his oeuvre with moodiness and a breath of unsaid contents.