Vanessa Billy
14 Jan - 19 Feb 2011
Natural Means Something Like Vegetables
It is with great pleasure that we present the first solo exhibition in Denmark by the Swiss artist Vanessa Billy. The exhibition provides an insight into Billy's practice, which encompasses sculptures, collages and installations.
Vanessa Billy's works are in line with the arte povera tradition, which she reinvents in a poetic and understated fashion. The works do not 'shout' to gain the viewer's attention, but are discreet and wait to be discovered. For Billy, materials and form are an important part of the process of creating new works. At first glance they may appear asymmetrical and misshapen, but they possess an internal logic that bears witness to Billy's knowledge of the classical sculptural tradition. The relationship between the worthless plastic bag containing water and the vase that holds the bag creates a sense of curiosity and an 'aha' experience for the observer. The work also inspires thoughts of transience and temporality, as at some point the thin plastic bag will burst and the water will run out into the vase.
The materials in the exhibition's works are very lightly processed and relate to the transition from one state to another. We become spectators to a primordial state in which the boundaries between the dissolved, the volatile and the unworked flow together, so that it is the relationship between the materials that holds them in mutual check. We see this, for example, in the juxtaposition of fluid and solid structures. Billy employs a roughly similar method in her collages; an apparently familiar form - often a landscape - is conjoined with another, so that these fuse together, resulting in a small but powerful and sophisticated displacement of appearance and content. It is precisely these displacements that give Vanessa Billy's works their special character.
Vanessa Billy (b. 1978) is a graduate of the Chelsea College of Art, London, and has also studied in New York. She lives and works in both London and Zurich. She will be holding a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel in 2011, and in 2010 she held solo exhibitions at the Photographer's Gallery Project Space in London and Galleri BolteLang in Zurich. She has participated in various group exhibitions around Europe.
It is with great pleasure that we present the first solo exhibition in Denmark by the Swiss artist Vanessa Billy. The exhibition provides an insight into Billy's practice, which encompasses sculptures, collages and installations.
Vanessa Billy's works are in line with the arte povera tradition, which she reinvents in a poetic and understated fashion. The works do not 'shout' to gain the viewer's attention, but are discreet and wait to be discovered. For Billy, materials and form are an important part of the process of creating new works. At first glance they may appear asymmetrical and misshapen, but they possess an internal logic that bears witness to Billy's knowledge of the classical sculptural tradition. The relationship between the worthless plastic bag containing water and the vase that holds the bag creates a sense of curiosity and an 'aha' experience for the observer. The work also inspires thoughts of transience and temporality, as at some point the thin plastic bag will burst and the water will run out into the vase.
The materials in the exhibition's works are very lightly processed and relate to the transition from one state to another. We become spectators to a primordial state in which the boundaries between the dissolved, the volatile and the unworked flow together, so that it is the relationship between the materials that holds them in mutual check. We see this, for example, in the juxtaposition of fluid and solid structures. Billy employs a roughly similar method in her collages; an apparently familiar form - often a landscape - is conjoined with another, so that these fuse together, resulting in a small but powerful and sophisticated displacement of appearance and content. It is precisely these displacements that give Vanessa Billy's works their special character.
Vanessa Billy (b. 1978) is a graduate of the Chelsea College of Art, London, and has also studied in New York. She lives and works in both London and Zurich. She will be holding a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel in 2011, and in 2010 she held solo exhibitions at the Photographer's Gallery Project Space in London and Galleri BolteLang in Zurich. She has participated in various group exhibitions around Europe.