RaidFC is proud to announce Catharsis, Per Hüttner's first solo exhibition at the gallery, finally returning to California after a four year absence. Hüttner lives in a stasis where life and artistic creation are tightly intertwined. He has developed a very unique and personal strategy for his artistic practice. A consummate traveller, he is as much at home in burgeoning cities of the occident, as he is in the replete mountains of the orient all leaves traces in his oeuvre. Hüttner has drawn artistic energy from the enormity of California to develop some of his most important exhibitions at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Kontainer Gallery in Los Angeles.

For Catharsis, Hüttner is showing new photographs and drawings which study the mysterious space between sex and violence. In the latter we see naked couples falling through space or floating under water, found engaging in strange and erotic repose and retort. The borders which separate the inside and outside of their bodies are suspended like borders between pleasure and pain, man and animal, human and machine, beauty and disgust.

Hüttner uses the coolness of photographic medium and the dreamlike qualities of night to make contortionist assertions about life's pathways. They encourage us to abandon our inhibitions and embrace our potential. The body remains central to the image, but in contrast to the drawings it lies lonely and focused, orifices secreting fluids in unusual ways.

But it is in the meeting between the two freedoms of the photographs and the drawings that Hüttner's propositions reveal their provocative and visionary qualities. Together they offer an opening to a private space where the body and the ego become one. He unleashes the fantasies, secrets and realities of our souls to wed the grotesque of Goya with the sexually explosive aesthetic realms of Oshima.