Quartz - Russell Maurice

Russell Maurice (b. 1975 in Newcastle, UK) presents his second solo exhibition Quartz with Ruttkowski;68 in Cologne.

The entangled and intertwined nuances of the human psyche, the consciousness and emotions in the vast spectrum of in-betweens and extremes, are carried in this exhibition’s essence. They are translated, transformed and transferred into energy and information according to personal references with their inherent logic.

Starting from the masks Sock and Buskin, the ancient Greek symbols for comedy and tragedy (aka life), investigation and research then drew the artist to quartz crystals where the material’s capacity of double refraction transmits an allegory of duality, catalysing the artist’s thinking and approach through the show.

A self-referential drawing system emerges and is repeatedly regurgitated in an iterative process until it sits comfortably with the artist. The convoluted atmosphere and aesthetics of the works – carefully thought through and anarchically explosive in the same moment – tell of other, hidden, subversive and miscellaneous forms of relations, messages and references in their ever-present ambiguity.

Forming a landscape of recognisable but radically misshapen creatures and objects  – (im)mortal and (sub)conscious beings, distorted, distilled and deformed – Russell Maurice turns the familiar into the deeply peculiar, the mundane into the genuinely uncanny and the inherent mystery into the deviancy of normative reality.