MOTINTERNATIONAL Brussels is delighted to present a new body of work by Raphael Danke in his second exhibition with the gallery. Danke’s collages, photographs and sculptures explore the space between representation and abstraction. His practice considers the relationship between the human body and architecture and tests points of contact between physical form and abstract thought.
In Pushed Back and Pulled Back Danke has worked with heavily textured wallpaper that mimics the facades of brick buildings. After projecting a figure onto the surface, the artist removes the shadow’s shape from the material and reassembles the leftover negative spaces onto canvas. Gilding the canvas with ‘Dutch metal’, a metal foil that, in time, oxidizes and fades, Danke echoes the disappearance of the ephemeral shadow, and of the body itself.

The artist sets up tensions between deletion and construction within the exhibition. Drawing from the reflective surfaces of Mathias Goeritz’s monumental sculptures, a pair of gold paintings, Big Nude 3 and Untitled, 2014, mirror the preceding works, making use of their leftover material. Here the embossed ‘bricks’ are abstracted and allowed to float weightlessly on the flat planes of the paintings burnished surfaces. Danke’s paintings are antonyms of each other, and his practice constantly returns to how ideas of physicality can be shaped through absence and disappearance; how traces might become sculptural and materiality perceived via voids and omissions. Raphael Danke’s sculptures recall both Duchamp’s Étant Donnés and his bronze casts of isolated body parts. Their anthropomorphic appearance underlines the artist’s own surrealistic engagement with eroticised forms. Additional collage works presented in the exhibition continue this association: cutting up and reassembling pages from fashion magazines, the artist removes the models who become enigmatic abstractions, remaining only in suggestive coils of hair and tendrils of clothing.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21426