David Chieppo / Cassidy Toner. What you see first

Curated by Katharina Dunst and Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth

With "David Chieppo – Cassidy Toner. What you see first", Kunst Raum Riehen opens the new exhibition year with a duo show. David Chieppo, born in New Haven in 1973, and Cassidy Toner, born and raised in Baltimore in 1992, completed their art education in Switzerland, where they now live and work. Both draw their works from the visual memory of our contemporary world, often mediated by the media, and combine traditional types of images with the present. A great directness and no fear of touching moments characterize both works.

Happiness and its opposite, desire and its unattainability as well as the supposedly fatal feeling of having fulfilled a wish can be experienced in front of the pictures and installations.

Without beating around the bush, Cassidy Toner transforms a meeting with three recumbent figures into a game of darts, with her own face, cast in bronze, becoming the target. Both the techniques Toner uses and the content of her pictorial inventions are rich in allusion and put the viewer to the test.

Is it coincidence or skill when things fall into place happily?

David Chieppo's paintings are just as vivid. In his often figurative works, the seemingly solid becomes fluid and the accidental can easily turn into something fateful. The painter's ability to condense spaces and ideas, to capture memorable situations and merge them with imaginary planes can be traced in Chieppo's work. Harsh contrasts depict delicate scenes whose echoes suggest a deep space.