Needles & Pens presents,
Three-way Ticket
a trio show featuring,
Søren Behncke, Liz Schmidt, & Michael Swaney
Opening Reception: Friday June 30, 2017, from 6:00 – 9:00 P.M.
Three-way Ticket, defines contemporary figurative painting into three categories: figurative painting with traditional oil painting influence, presented by Liz Yoshiko Schmidt (San Francisco), figurative painting with illustrative influence presented by Søren Behncke (Aarhus), and figurative painting with art brut influence presented by Michael Swaney (Barcelona). These three contemporary accounts define figurative painting today.
Liz Yoshiko Schmidt is a Japanese American painter born in Chicago, Illinois. Schmidt lives and works in San Francisco, California, and is currently studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, finishing her bachelors of fine arts in painting. Her paintings are figurative depictions of her colleagues and friends, her studio, and the still-life objects in her workspace. Schmidt picks out consciously and sometimes sub-consciously her subject matter and the objects in her studio environment that she wishes to paint. She creates an autobiographical environment that is full of posters, her own paintings, her materials, and mirrors in which her reflection appears. She paints as a way of documenting herself, the individuals and the environment around her. Liz Yoshiko Schmidt is also an international professional figure skater.
Micheal Swaney was born in Canada and is based in Barcelona. In 2000 he graduated with an Illustration and Design diploma from Capilano University in Vancouver and has showed his works around North America and Europe since then. He makes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and quilts and is inspired by everything that occurs on the margins of society and academia, creating his own language form that builds on an Art Brut background. The imagery in his work mixes abstraction and figuration.
Søren Behncke (Papfar) is a danish sculptor and painter, born May 9, 1967 in Sønderborg, Denmark. He moved to Aarhus at the age of seventeen. Søren Behncke has a background as an illustrator and graphic designer, but changed his focus in 2003, and began to work with sculpture and painting instead. Behncke does both gallery-oriented works, and sculptural happenings and actions in public spaces. Inspired by the architecture students’ use of cardboard and glue guns for their model building, he makes works of discarded papers he collects from the neighborhood around the changing mini studio at home and abroad. His choice of material not only keeps production costs to a minimum, but the rich packaging universe of warning signs and logos has become an integrated and unique feature in Behncke’s visual language. In Denmark, Behncke is best known under the alias ‘Papfar’ because of its spectacular happenings and staging of cardboard sculptures in the public space. Among his works is a sculpture of a Massey Ferguson tractor in the size 1: 1, a cardboard rabbit tied to a tree, various tools in cardboard, and a tribute to Jørgen Nash in the form of a 4m long papers in front of the Little Mermaid . In 2005, he smashed a man-made cardboard snake bush to the giant Boy at the Aros Aarhus Art Museum, which three years later officially invited him to a solo show in the West Gallery. He has since added another identity to the list of aliases – namely the “Posemanden”, which is the name he uses when the woven or embroidered images with strips of plastic bag into the wire fence.
On display in the gallery through July 31, 2017.
(*image by Søren Behncke)
