Kirsi Mikkola
04 Sep - 23 Oct 2010
KIRSI MIKKOLA
Dark Core Breathing
4 Sept - 23 Oct 2010
carlier | gebauer is happy to present new works by the finnish artist Kirsi Mikkola. Mikkola already worked with carlier | gebauer in the 90s; Dark Core Breathing, opening Friday, September 10th, is her first solo show after a long self-imposed hiatus.
Throughout the last 20 years, Mikkola went from sculpture to collages. Prior to the nowadays constructions - elaborate and visually striking layers of countless pieces of painted paper - there were bodies out of clay and ceramics, glazed with translucent, yet strikingly colorful surfaces, using the grammar of comic strips. The fantastically disturbing, candid sculptures have moved onto abstraction, enforcing a space entirely of their own. Here the ambiguities and irritations of Mikkola’s dealing with classical genres of art - sculpture, drawing and painting - become even more condensed. The artist layers myriads of painted paper, cut-outs, shot through with blots of color, and newspaper slits into surfaces of ambiguous spatial depth, evoking a precision of pigmented Gestaltung which brushes cannot reach.
All of Mikkola’s artistic efforts aim to a truly independent picture. As the most intense part of her work, she would mention her method of not having a method: the epic struggle for focussing on the picture, the denial of anything narrative or anecdotical, avoiding the easiness of aesthetics. "It's no fun to be an artist" she states, describing the demanding act of self-emancipation from references and “aboutness”.
Dark Core Breathing
4 Sept - 23 Oct 2010
carlier | gebauer is happy to present new works by the finnish artist Kirsi Mikkola. Mikkola already worked with carlier | gebauer in the 90s; Dark Core Breathing, opening Friday, September 10th, is her first solo show after a long self-imposed hiatus.
Throughout the last 20 years, Mikkola went from sculpture to collages. Prior to the nowadays constructions - elaborate and visually striking layers of countless pieces of painted paper - there were bodies out of clay and ceramics, glazed with translucent, yet strikingly colorful surfaces, using the grammar of comic strips. The fantastically disturbing, candid sculptures have moved onto abstraction, enforcing a space entirely of their own. Here the ambiguities and irritations of Mikkola’s dealing with classical genres of art - sculpture, drawing and painting - become even more condensed. The artist layers myriads of painted paper, cut-outs, shot through with blots of color, and newspaper slits into surfaces of ambiguous spatial depth, evoking a precision of pigmented Gestaltung which brushes cannot reach.
All of Mikkola’s artistic efforts aim to a truly independent picture. As the most intense part of her work, she would mention her method of not having a method: the epic struggle for focussing on the picture, the denial of anything narrative or anecdotical, avoiding the easiness of aesthetics. "It's no fun to be an artist" she states, describing the demanding act of self-emancipation from references and “aboutness”.