DUVE Berlin is pleased to present *EAF - EUROPEAN AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP * a group show on tendencies of young minimal, abstract, contemporary art, presenting the genre from a European and an American perspective. It examines the anatomy of abstraction through new innovations in painting, works on paper and installation, showing how young contemporary artists use methods and material to tackle the historical limitations of abstract art and by circumventing traditional precedents, offering a fluid, more organic re-interpretation of the hard-edged historical formal conventions. This show is a 2-part project, followed by *DAF - Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft* in June 2012, presenting the abstract genre from a modern German and contemporary American perspective.

DAVIDE BALULA
Throughout Balula's art making practice - which includes sound installation, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and photography and favours no one discipline over another - the artist examines and upends the straightforward nature of visual and sensory perception through the formation of new interactions between materials, space, time and ideas. At the core of Balula's work is the belief in the subjectivity of what we know. He pokes at, plays with and tests the limits of perception by creating a frequently strange relativity between materials and ideas, which, in turn, determines a fundamentally altered experience of what is viewed.

DAN SHAW-TOWN
creates minimal and abstract works on paper using graphite and spray enamel with which he engulfs the sheets in a repetitive process of mark marking, coating and rubbing. These entirely covered sheets become a sculptural material with new potential, and are handled as such. Often becoming bent and folded before then being displayed, sometimes on the floor or on the wall with nails running through their metal grommets. Shaw-Town sets up parameters in which to create the work, and the primary goal is to cover the sheet, an entropic system of transformation allowing the artist to get from A to B within a partially controlled yet fundamentally spontaneous process.

LUKE BARBER-SMITH *STAINS, SCRATCHES and BURNS*
The works *horizontal smoked frame* and *wet truck with nails* show the effects of fire and water on impressionable materials, captured in printed colour photographs. The process of creating and photographing stains, scratches and burns is a means to explore the idea of decay, as it relates to architecture and structure. The images position the act of photography next to the process of producing a creative object: the affected material. Through the use of digital media, the produced images are balanced and edited by the artist to capture a perfect perspective, resulting in a printed photograph more powerful than the object itself.

JIM LEE
investigates painting as a three-dimensional object and maintains his ongoing engagement with materiality and space, physicality and texture, colour and form. Integrating painting with elements of drawing and sculpture the work challenges the confines of surface, line, scale and frame to expand earnestly upon a post minimalist tradition. Melding humour and sincerity with a confluence of art historical references, Lee's works are expressive and raw and reveal compositions with loose, material play. Jim Lee's work teeters between fallibility and accomplishment, transforming the pathetic into the sublime. His impressions combine the architectural and the innate, in order to reintroduce the day's detritus into dialogue. It's through these familiar objects and methods that make this work, penetrating, personal and long lasting.