ANTONY VALERIAN: HELP YOURSELF TO PRETZELS

KÖNIG MEXICO CITY announces HELP YOURSELF TO PRETZELS. Antony Valerian invites us into his perception of reality for his inaugural show in Mexico City.

May 23 - June 20, 2024

The Hamburg-born artist created a series of paintings for his first solo show in Mexico City, HELP YOURSELF TO PRETZELS. The title symbolizes and connects Valerian with his German roots, a sort of ironic nod to stereotypes. The dark themes of the skeletons are a reference to “El Día de Los Muertos”, the Mexican Day of the Dead, honoring those passed.

Arranged at the height of windows with a shared horizon line, the paintings in the exhibition offer a 360-degree view onto a compositionally and conceptually complex miasma of colorful abstraction. Their astounding beauty is rooted in horror. Indeed, the gestural washes that veil the canvas belie the steely logic of Tran’s politically encoded color theory. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 19 million gallons of chemical weapons onto the jungles of Vietnam.

His melancholic scenes evoke a nostalgic melancholy while bringing an impatient dynamic. The familiarity of these nowhere places brings a sense of belonging while alienating the viewer at the same time.

Powerful brushstrokes with flowing colors give a dynamic nature to otherwise eerie backdrops. He creates an atmosphere that pulls the viewer in, washes over, and enthralls us.

Valerian’s paintings move like a sequential glitch in our visual pictorial knowledge matrix. Everything is processed into each other or has been separated in the layering of color, duct, or composition, which arises and falls apart when looking closely or stepping back.

Antony Valerian (b. 1992 in Hamburg, Germany) lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, and Berlin, Germany. He received a Diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (expanded pictorial space, Daniel Richter) and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.