Cäcilia Brown, Kerstin Von Gabain, Thea Moeller, Alexander Ruthner, Marina Sula
27 Apr - 16 Jun 2018
CÄCILIA BROWN, KERSTIN VON GABAIN, THEA MOELLER, ALEXANDER RUTHNER, MARINA SULA
27 April – 16 June 2018
All the artists featured in this exhibition have an ongoing occupation with public space in their practice and explore its different components placed within the gallery setting. Including such diverse distances from and to those accessible territories, we are presented with positions operating from the meta level alongside workswith ever diminishing distance until we end up at our bodies.
Cäcilia Brown focuses on public space as a seismograph revealing societal implications. While often citing components of urban space, the replicas are almost beyond recognition due to profuse processing. Generated from considerably solid and weighty materials, they still end up looking remarkably light. In her sculpture “Tooth fairy” from the series “Working Girls” she translates the structure of the concrete weights that hang along railroad tracks into fragile wax forms.
Alexander Ruthner ’s paintings of meadows unveil a longing for the virginal and pristine space. Albeit, some paintings of this series, uncannily only upon a closer look, disclose the corruption of such spots. The sort of litter found in his meadows, mostly drugs, hint at subcultural festivals or parties and may allow us to see the connotations between different paths to escapism. In his body of work, immediacy is bypassed via the use of images as the template. This frequently entails the back and forth of borrowed art historical references by other media such as fashion advertising, which Ruthner seems to repossess by, in turn, painting the adaptation.
Thea Moeller ’s interest mainly lies in deterritorializing architectural forms. After swiftly taking pictures of a wide range of buildings, she slows down and scans the photographs meticulously until she decides on the details she is going to reproduce, devoid of its usual context and function, only to accelerate again and rapidly engineer her works. They are meant to be somewhat unfinished, imperfect and only loosely reminiscent of their origins. Further, her fondness of prototypes dictates that the first attempt in production is the only one.
Marina Sula ’s bench seems to encourage us to rest, simultaneously though, the materials it consists of are anything but signaling comfort, the surface being transparent with hoses and a face mask among others displayed. All those utensils are hidden byproducts of our everyday life. While hoses are not decorative enough to be displayed, face masks are part of a private ritual. Both play into Sula’s interest in the body and its absence - the hose transporting water, while face masks are put on the skin and allow the nourishing ingredients to penetrate it. Containing solid, liquid and processed materials as well as pharmaceutical and organic goods, a delicate system of stability and instability in an increasingly complex scenario between all too human “shortcomings” and communicative capitalism’s codes of conduct are being explored.
Kerstin von Gabain detects everyday objects, sometimes an architectural detail, and initially maps out the precise idea of how the work itself as well as the picture she is taking of it has to look, and by which materials and means the result must be completed. The perfection in the formal likeness is further often achieved by taking casts of the objects, but evoking estrangement by reproducing them with surprising materials. Her work for this exhibition reminds of a climbing wall, with references to her recurrent use of bones as templates, redone in wax, everting and displaying it on the wall.
- Sandra Petrasevic
27 April – 16 June 2018
All the artists featured in this exhibition have an ongoing occupation with public space in their practice and explore its different components placed within the gallery setting. Including such diverse distances from and to those accessible territories, we are presented with positions operating from the meta level alongside workswith ever diminishing distance until we end up at our bodies.
Cäcilia Brown focuses on public space as a seismograph revealing societal implications. While often citing components of urban space, the replicas are almost beyond recognition due to profuse processing. Generated from considerably solid and weighty materials, they still end up looking remarkably light. In her sculpture “Tooth fairy” from the series “Working Girls” she translates the structure of the concrete weights that hang along railroad tracks into fragile wax forms.
Alexander Ruthner ’s paintings of meadows unveil a longing for the virginal and pristine space. Albeit, some paintings of this series, uncannily only upon a closer look, disclose the corruption of such spots. The sort of litter found in his meadows, mostly drugs, hint at subcultural festivals or parties and may allow us to see the connotations between different paths to escapism. In his body of work, immediacy is bypassed via the use of images as the template. This frequently entails the back and forth of borrowed art historical references by other media such as fashion advertising, which Ruthner seems to repossess by, in turn, painting the adaptation.
Thea Moeller ’s interest mainly lies in deterritorializing architectural forms. After swiftly taking pictures of a wide range of buildings, she slows down and scans the photographs meticulously until she decides on the details she is going to reproduce, devoid of its usual context and function, only to accelerate again and rapidly engineer her works. They are meant to be somewhat unfinished, imperfect and only loosely reminiscent of their origins. Further, her fondness of prototypes dictates that the first attempt in production is the only one.
Marina Sula ’s bench seems to encourage us to rest, simultaneously though, the materials it consists of are anything but signaling comfort, the surface being transparent with hoses and a face mask among others displayed. All those utensils are hidden byproducts of our everyday life. While hoses are not decorative enough to be displayed, face masks are part of a private ritual. Both play into Sula’s interest in the body and its absence - the hose transporting water, while face masks are put on the skin and allow the nourishing ingredients to penetrate it. Containing solid, liquid and processed materials as well as pharmaceutical and organic goods, a delicate system of stability and instability in an increasingly complex scenario between all too human “shortcomings” and communicative capitalism’s codes of conduct are being explored.
Kerstin von Gabain detects everyday objects, sometimes an architectural detail, and initially maps out the precise idea of how the work itself as well as the picture she is taking of it has to look, and by which materials and means the result must be completed. The perfection in the formal likeness is further often achieved by taking casts of the objects, but evoking estrangement by reproducing them with surprising materials. Her work for this exhibition reminds of a climbing wall, with references to her recurrent use of bones as templates, redone in wax, everting and displaying it on the wall.
- Sandra Petrasevic