LOS ANGELES, CA.- Martha Otero Gallery presents Eden, an exhibit of paintings and drawings by Matthias Düwel, curated by Julie Machado.

Düwel’s work centers on the idea of flux, excess and superabundance. At first glance, the environmental issues addressed in his pieces deflect recognition, due to the skillful use of unique color spaces—from chromatic grays to highly saturated pinks, greens, blues and violets.

The worlds Düwel constructs are reminiscent of amusement parks, camouflaging so to speak the seriousness of the subject matter. His chaotically vivid, whirlwind compositions spin out of control, however upon closer inspection, little areas of respite, little Edens appear: a snow globe, an Airstream trailer, a suburban enclave. These idealized enclaves produce the realization that only deep inside ourselves, within the confines of our own inner sanctum, can we find the stability that we as humans inherently seek...our personal Eden. Borrowing on a similar iconography, the drawings presented in this exhibition are more intently focused on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and its ongoing repercussions.

Matthias Düwel was born in Berlin, Germany in 1957. He received his MFA from the Berlin Universität der Künste in 1983, where he studied under Klaus Fussmann. The following year he was awarded a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service to live and work in NYC. That same year, he was made artist-in-residence at the NYU Deutsches Haus and received a one-year studio fellowship at the N.Y. Studio School, where he worked with Fred Thursz and David Reed. In 1986, Düwel received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Solo exhibitions of Düwel’s work have been held at venues in New York, Paris, Berlin, Denver and Tucson, among others. Earlier this year, 26 of his pieces were shown in Consumer/Consumption, an exhibition with glass artist Matt Eskuche at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Musée d’Estampes, Geneva, the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (Museum of the City of Berlin), the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Düwel has in addition taught art for many years, first at Parsons School of Design and for the past seven years as Lead Art Faculty at Pima Community College in Tucson. After living in NYC for 20 years, Düwel moved to Oracle, Arizona, in 2004, where he resides today.