BERLIN, GERMANY.- Galerie Kai Hilgemann will feature Liv Mette Larsen: Berlin Vertical, 28 April – 10 June, 2007. The Norwegian artist Liv Mette Larsen conceives her current paintings as spatial installations, which she arranges in loose series and “patterns” at each new exhibition location. The theme series and fragments has occupied her before in previous work cycles. The focus of the series “Berlin Vertical” is the human silhouette; however, gesture or facial expression does not dominate, but rather the large figure as counterpoint to small format abstract fragments of city architecture. Here, details and individual monochrome planes open up associations on fragmentary variations in form, colour, line, and view.

Characteristic for the intensive colourfulness of the works is the rich egg-tempera pigment blend, which comes to great effect on a natural grey, transparently primed canvas with a surface left rough. The artist, who has lived in Berlin since 1977, celebrates wilful “meandering”, totally free of a fixed, precisely defined placement in the urban fabric. She collects impressions from the roof of her house or arbitrary, cut out snapshot-like views from her studio window in Kreuzberg. Thus coincidence and concept play an equal role and the fragmentary works become a playful combination of networked exploration of the city. The details of her unusual perspectives form a microcosm, which in turn is in harmony with the whole. The artist celebrates set pieces of sequences, which arrange themselves before the eye of the observer into an autonomous series of images.

A series of watercolours, “Cologne Vertical”, augment the Berlin works, and vary, in exciting angles of view “en detail,” the unmistakable silhouette of the cologne cathedral. This is Liv Mette Larsen’s third solo exhibition in the Kai Hilgemann Gallery, which has been representing her since 1999. An Exhibition in the Schleswig-Holstein State Gallery will be mounted in collaboration with the Kai Hilgemann Gallery from 1 – 28 May, 2007. A forthcoming joint catalogue will be published including articles written by Professor Jeannot Simmen and Petra Schmidt-Dreyblatt.