winston wächter fine art seattle spring preview

www.winstonwachter.com

Winston Wächter Fine Art Spring Preview

206.652.5855 [email protected] www.winstonwachter.com

Cover and opposite page: Kim Simonsson

Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle is excited to announce spring is bringing new artists and new collaborations. Our May exhibition will feature the internationally celebrated Haas Brothers and the innovative work of master glass artist Jeffrey Zimmerman. Additionally, we will introduce ceramicists Kim Simonsson and Andrew Casto. All of these artists have pushed their work beyond traditional methods, bringing a fresh perspective appropriate for the season.

Kim Simonsson (born in 1974) almost became a soccer player but, while biking to a practice one day, lost his football boots and decided to become an artist. Kim entered the Department of Ceramic and Glass at the University of Arts & Design and was thereafter captivated by the threedimensional possibilities of clay. Since Kim was a small boy his hands could transform materials into a variety of forms. While other children were building snowmen, he sculpted a snowy Donald Duck.

After graduating, Kim lived in Canada for three years before returning to Finland in 2004, when he was awarded the Young Artist of the Year prize. In the same year he was invited to work for the Arabia Art Department Society, initially as a guest artist. His room was soon filled with lifesized children and animals, just as the room of sculptor Michael Schilkin, one of the first artists to work at the factory, had been. Kim Simonsson also works in his home studio located in the Fiskars Village, the birthplace of the famous orange scissors and nowadays known for its creative cooperative, ONOMA. Kim Simonsson has displayed his works in private exhibitions all over the world, in cities such as New York, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki.

Kim Simonsson


The Haas Brothers, twins Nikolai and Simon (b. 1984 Los Angeles), had a creative upbringing in Austin, Texas where their opera singer mother, actor brother, and sculptor father taught them to play music, write, sing and paint. Starting in their early teens, they studied stone carving under their father, mastering the craft before leaving home. The twins parted ways in 2003 to pursue their artistic goals individually. Simon studied painting at RISD while Nikolai toured as a musician with artists like Vincent Gallo, Sean Lennon and Jim O’Rourke through his early 20s. In 2007, the two reconvened in Los Angeles to tour with the band RRIICCEE, then founded the HAAS BROTHERS there in 2010 when L.A. architects Johnston Marklee offered a chance to collaborate on a friend’s project. The brothers received attention right away for their nimble craftsmanship and clever use of materials, and the few years since have seen them evolve from fabricators and collaborators to studio art innovators.

In their current works, the Haas Brothers explore aesthetic and formal themes related to nature, science fiction, sexuality, psychedelia and color theory. Their mastery and unique use of materials ranging from brass, bronze, porcelain and fur to highly technical resins and polyurethane, matched with their insatiable curiosity and remarkable visual intelligence, sets them apart as artists.

The Haas Brothers

Jeff Zimmerman was born Kentucky in 1968. He spent his childhood at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado, with his artist parents. In 1988, while pursuing a degree in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Zimmerman took his first glassblowing class. He received his BFA at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee. Summers were spent on staff at Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle, where Zimmerman was exposed to master Italian glassworkers Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto. Zimmerman’s training also includes working as a master glassblower at the International Center of Research on Glass and Visual Arts (CIRVA), in Marseille, France.

Zimmerman joined the collaborative, experimental glassblowing group called the B Team in 1994. The B Team was a student group of glass artists founded by Zesty Meyers and Evan Synderman in 1991. They traveled to colleges and universities doing performances related to glassmaking until they disbanded in 1998. The B Team received the BESSY award in 1998 from the Dance Theater Workshop, and their work was exhibited at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, and the Grand Arts Center in Kansas City.

Zimmerman’s solo work was first recognized in 1999 in his exhibition, “Anthropology Museum of the Future,” at the Robert Lehman Gallery, UrbanGlass, in Brooklyn, New York. Since then, his work has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Sean Kelly Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris, and the Boghossian Foundation in Belgium. Zimmerman currently lives and works in Brooklyn.


Jeffrey Zimmerman

My current body of work involves an investigation into dialogues concerning extant negative forces in our lives, and to what degree the phenomenological ramifications of responsibilities and stress shape us physically, mentally, and emotionally. The formal language present in this analysis is based on a material study of erosion and geological processes translated into ceramic and mixed media objects. I seek a purposeful link between macrocosmic environmental change, and interruptions in our otherwise routine existence. Within this inquiry, alternative and diverse construction methods are emphasized as tools of fresh, genuine expression in the creation of dynamic assemblages of great fragility. The foundation of this exploration is a desire to uncover the sublime in these moments of incongruity; the rush of presence into experience that might otherwise remain banal and ordinary, brought on by perceived inconvenience. My work asserts that it is possible for our daily vexations to illuminate the power of the present moment – something we all too often fail to notice.

At its best, this investigation becomes collaborative in nature, and includes input from other artists to assist in problem solving, critical feedback on the relevance of one technique over another, and in the fabrication of unique construction elements. I often appropriate the discarded remnants of others’ work into my own; a type of studio “sampling” in the electronica sense. My best work becomes intertwined with the sentiments of those around me, metaphorically and literally, and links my concerns and ideas to the immediate community in tangible fashion.

Andrew Casto


Andrew Casto

winston wächter fine art seattle spring preview

Documents