Leading German contemporary figurative painter Justine Otto (b. Poland 1974) won The Phillips Collection’s second annual Emerging Artist Prize following Washington’s 2014 (e)merge art fair. Otto’s exhibition hyder flares, on display at the Goethe-Institut Washington August 20 – September 4, 2015, borrows its name from this cosmic phenomenon as it focuses on such peculiar constellations, incidents and connections in human interactions.
Her representational pictures burn themselves into the viewer’s retina, simultaneously fascinating and disturbing. Justine Otto has received a number of stipends and other prizes, including the 2011 Lüneburg Region Culture Advancement Award and a 2013 Frankfurt Lions Club Prize.
Opening on Thursday, August 20, 6 – 9 pm with artist Justine Otto and Vesela Sretenovic, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Phillips Collection
About hyder flares:
Following things behind the sun (Kunstverein Duisburg) and pink moon (Kunsthalle Lüneburg), the exhibition hyder flares continues Justine Otto’s use of cosmic or planetary phenomena for naming her exhibitions. Cosmic constellations don’t play a direct role in her work. However, Otto utilizes them to point to occurrences and incidents which can affect and shape human relations, similar to T.C. Boyle’s short stories in the volume Tooth and Claw, in which wild nature fiercely recaptures its space or meteorite impacts are fastidiously listed in chronology with their accompanying death tolls.
Human life is just as unpredictable as natural phenomena. Incidents which at first glance appear irrelevant can prompt someone to follow a new path, or can destroy entire lives. These moments flare up and disappear just like hyder flares, and no one knows when they will recur.
Couples from another time, people holding gatherings or conspiratorially ...More...
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