André Hemer

Leisure/Pleasure/Sex/Power/Beauty/Danger - Danger!

 

The works in this exhibition were produced by New Zealand artist André Hemer during his Artist-in-Residence at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins in 2009.  

The installation and painting project at the hotel comes at a time when art and leisure are becoming economically uncertain facets of life - and yet the escapism that both can provide are in many ways even more essential.

 

The project is a large painting installation on the glass facades of the hotel and suite of corresponding small paintings. Both parts of the project seek to respond specifically to the nature of the hotel’s environment where the surroundings relate ideas of the bourgeois and the make-believe. 

Brightly coloured bands of enormous paint drips work their way down the window panes of the Sofitel building - visible to both guests on the inside and the public on the exterior of the building, acting as a viewing point for both. The exaggerated nature of the digitally drawn drips adds both comic elements and contradictions surrounded the process and material. The digital and commercially manufactured nature of the cut vinyl is in contrast to the hand-painted gestures that overlay the translucent materials - all of which seem to seep out collectively from Sofitel’s architecture.

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Andre Hemer, 2009

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