Solo show Zurich

SMASH137

2015 APR 23 – MAI 25

THERE IS A WOLF AT THE DOOR

No one else than Adrian Falkner/Smash137 could have given a title more explicit for his exhibition: There is a wolf at the door.

As an artist from the graffti movement, Smash137 knows the extreme stressful situations. When he sprays his name on a public space, danger is everywhere. The time given to him is always very short; lines must be fast and accurate. Painting at night or with low luminosity doesn’t help his work on colors, he must then play with contrasts. Managing stress due to transgressions is the hardest; at any time an alert could be given or worse, the police could arrest him red-handed.

As a artist, Adrian Falkner uses all his experience from graffiti in his studio-based art work. The wolf is not the same anymore, but there is always one. He must assume and defend his artistic choices, as critics are waiting in the corner. The public, ever more demanding over the years, waits to see a perfect exhibition. Collectors are not left out, they too expect to see the artist evolve.

All this pressure, Adrian Falkner / Smash137 controls on both sides, and the exhibition he presents at the Kolly Gallery in Zurich is a new demonstration.

“There is a wolf at the door.”

Adrian Falkner/Smash137, 2015

Summer 2013 – somewhere between Paris and Detroit – somewhere in the middle of the metamorphosis. In the last 15 months the work of SMASH137 has been transfered from a Graffiti based calligraphic- writing-style to a style of colourful painting using the form of single letters as powerful signs. A gestural abstract painting is on the move. All in all it looks like a frozen moment of forms and colours fighting each other which seems to explode. But nevertheless the paintings appear throughout well balanced. Leonardo’s ten characteristics of an object are almost exemplified reproduced by SMASH137 various combinations with lightness and darkness, colour and substance, form and position, distance and closeness, action and stagnancy. Construction and deconstruction are the characteristics and part of his strategy. In the battle of line against line, surface against surface, colour against colour, SMASH137 is constantly confronted to one of the main questions of painting what has been achieved and what needs to be changed. But this development from Graffiti to pure painting as well as the metamorphosis from the Street Artist SMASH137 into the (new) artist Adrian Falkner (his real name) has its price. For some, he moved too far away from Street Art style. For others he is still too close. For some, it contains too much writing. For others it’s too gestural, too abstract, and too neo-informal. No matter how you approach to the paintings of SMASH137 none of them will leave you cold. They polarize when we awake and confuse when we see them.

(Text: Harald Kraemer)