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Slippage: Taras Polataiko, Gerhard Richter, Lucio Fontana

Through the work of three prominent international contemporary artists – Ukrainian-Canadian Taras Polataiko, German Gerhard Richter, and Argentinean Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) – slippage addresses representation, the painted surface, and the device of the mirror in relation to the artists’ paintings, photographs, installations, and prints.

When painter/sculptor Lucio Fontana first pierced his paintings, he called attention to the dimensional quality of his canvas. The painting was not, for Fontana, simply a pictorial vehicle. In these ruptured paintings, called Concetti Spaziali or Spatial Conceptions, Fontana explored the expression of space through gesture. His puncture of the painting surface challenged trompe l’oeil illusion, replacing it with the material presence of the canvas. Through representational painting, abstraction, and photography, Gerhard Richter also experiments with the elusiveness of representation, and with the viewer’s grasp of the fullness of reality through painting. Taras Polataiko’s parallel uses of photography, trompe l’oeil and a disrupted surface in several series further investigate the uses of reflection and illusion in contemporary practice.