Novum Spatium: Dieter Balzer and Dirk Salz

NEW YORK - Feb. 28, 2017 - PRLog -- JanKossen Contemporary is pleased to present Novum Spatium, a two-person show featuring German based artists Dirk Salz and Dieter Balzer, on view from March 16th to May 6th, 2017. Novum Spatium, meaning New Space, explores the concept of perception in relation to our environment, physical space and one's interaction within it.

Dieter Balzer, translates these ideas through pristine geometric abstraction, creating sculptural, minimalist form that deal with depth and negative space. Bright, intricate and overlapping; the complex elements built upon each other, carrythe viewer's eyes over and through an, endless looping, playground of planes.  Elements of Balzer's work run parallel to contemporary influences on graphic, industrial, and architectural design,  the flatness of the vibrantly colored foils create a contemporary twist on the theories of non-representational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_(arts) neoplasticism, cubist sculpture and the Japanese Superflat movement.

Where Balzer uses 3-dimensional elements, the work of Dirk Salz approaches these concepts from another perspective. Instead of creating physical depth with his work, Salz toys with the impression of it. Salz's uses simple, Supremacist compositions that seem to echo with their color transparency and smooth surfaces. These highly reflective pieces confront the viewer with their own image, and present an experience of shifting planes, and varying depths. Surrounding elements found within the work's environment emerge and are mirrored as one moves back and forth between the self and the work.  Like John McLaughlin's Light and Space movement, the works invoke a sense of temporality within one's perception like a Robert Irwin or James Turrel installation; reinventing the world around us.

Together, the two artists create a visual dialogue that is crisp, energetic and articulate. Moving between the two bodies of work invokes a sense of moving between worlds, one that brightly invokes the geometric quality of architecture and the digital world that is so family to us, while the other allows us to reflect on the quality of space and our place within it.

Dieter Balzer studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Chesterfield College of Art. His work can be viewed across Germany at the Stern-Wywiol Galerie in Hamburg and the Galerie Corona Unger in Bremen, Germany; and has previously shown across the United States and Canada. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Dirk Salz studied at RWTH in Aachen, Germany and lives and works in Mulheim an der Ruhr. Exhibitions include public institutions such as the Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenburg, Kunstmuseum Mülheim/Ruhr, Germany and has shown with various international galleries and art fairs.

About JanKossen Contemporary

JanKossen Contemporary was established in Basel 2009, and focuses primarily on abstract, conceptual art created by both established and mid-career international talents. The gallery is committed to publishing artist's books featuring scholarship by leading contemporary thinkers as well as previously unpublished archival material.

Maintaining exhibition spaces in New York, USA and in Venice, Italy (2017), and an office in Basel, Switzerland, while participating in art fairs internationally, JanKossen Contemporary also specializes in private sales in the secondary market with a focus on the work by European, Chinese and American twentieth century and contemporary artists. The gallery also provides advisory and collection management services.