Courtesy the artist & Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin
The exhibition A TOWN WITH AN OCEAN VIEW presents new works by Berlin based artist Daniel Hauptmann (b. 1980 Hamburg). In his examination of the fake, Hauptmann's preoccupation with the different understandings of beauty in East Asia and Western Europe comes to the fore. He himself grew up in both cultures and was influenced by them in his formal thinking. From a Western point of view, an artificial surface is not considered beautiful. Beauty is reserved for nature and naturalness. From an eastern point of view, it is precisely the emptiness, the surface, that is of essential importance from which beauty is created. Hauptmann takes up both approaches in his pictures and brings them into a tense relationship between lightness and heaviness, surface and depth, fake and nature.
