Nina Canell
29 Apr - 04 Jun 2011
NINA CANELL
Matter of the Heart
29 April - 4 June, 2011
Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition ‘Matter of the Heart’ by Nina Canell.
‘Matter of the Heart’ brings forth a group of sculptural works which produce modest material crossovers and complicates our conception of proximity and distance. Taking its cue from a musical passage (supposedly the first intentionally composed ‘fade-out’) Canell presents an underwater study in which the fluctuating depths of a river have been methodically mapped and collected with an oceanographic ‘Nansen Bottle’ in order to imagine the descending motion of slowly sinking to the bottom (Anatomy of the Rising Tide). The act of waning or giving way - to grow duller and dimmer until something is completely washed out - thus leaps from the pages of a musical score and plunges into a quiet underwater event. In some ways the transparency of the water defies distinction between the meticulously measured strata, instead lending it a compact feeling of stillness. A discrete sense of fluidity, or what Gaston Bachelard may have called ‘the imagination of movement’, is an insistent component which appears to drift through ‘Matter of the Heart’ as a slight wind or draft. Open and half-open doors is a returning reference, picked up in several works such as ‘A Model Where Things Merge’ which consists of a number of stolen door-stops, gathered into a linear wave-shaped multiple. There is a given principle at work which firmly embodies the belief that ‘the form of a given thing is the outcome of what it has endured’.
The exhibition ‘Matter of the Heart’ can be seen as a parallel position to ‘Heart of the Matter’ at Galerie Barbara Wien Lukatsch. An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere between the material and the immaterial, forming and questioning the conductive relations between solid objects and mental processes.
Nina Canell’s work is currently on view in the solo exhibition Ode to Outer Ends at Kunsthalle Fridericianum (12.03.11 – 05.06.11, Kassel). Recent group exhibitions include ‘On Line’ at Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, ‘Touched - Liverpool Biennial’ at Tate Liverpool, UK and ‘Modernautställningen’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (all 2010). Selected solo exhibitions include ‘To Let Stay Projecting as a Bit of Branch on a Log by Not Chopping it Off’, MUMOK, Vienna, ‘Nought to Sixty’ at ICA, London, UK, and ‘Five Kinds of Water’ at Der Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany. Canell was the recipient of the Baloise Kunst Prize at Art Basel Statements in 2009 and the Ars Viva Prize, Germany in 2010.
Matter of the Heart
29 April - 4 June, 2011
Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition ‘Matter of the Heart’ by Nina Canell.
‘Matter of the Heart’ brings forth a group of sculptural works which produce modest material crossovers and complicates our conception of proximity and distance. Taking its cue from a musical passage (supposedly the first intentionally composed ‘fade-out’) Canell presents an underwater study in which the fluctuating depths of a river have been methodically mapped and collected with an oceanographic ‘Nansen Bottle’ in order to imagine the descending motion of slowly sinking to the bottom (Anatomy of the Rising Tide). The act of waning or giving way - to grow duller and dimmer until something is completely washed out - thus leaps from the pages of a musical score and plunges into a quiet underwater event. In some ways the transparency of the water defies distinction between the meticulously measured strata, instead lending it a compact feeling of stillness. A discrete sense of fluidity, or what Gaston Bachelard may have called ‘the imagination of movement’, is an insistent component which appears to drift through ‘Matter of the Heart’ as a slight wind or draft. Open and half-open doors is a returning reference, picked up in several works such as ‘A Model Where Things Merge’ which consists of a number of stolen door-stops, gathered into a linear wave-shaped multiple. There is a given principle at work which firmly embodies the belief that ‘the form of a given thing is the outcome of what it has endured’.
The exhibition ‘Matter of the Heart’ can be seen as a parallel position to ‘Heart of the Matter’ at Galerie Barbara Wien Lukatsch. An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere between the material and the immaterial, forming and questioning the conductive relations between solid objects and mental processes.
Nina Canell’s work is currently on view in the solo exhibition Ode to Outer Ends at Kunsthalle Fridericianum (12.03.11 – 05.06.11, Kassel). Recent group exhibitions include ‘On Line’ at Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, ‘Touched - Liverpool Biennial’ at Tate Liverpool, UK and ‘Modernautställningen’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (all 2010). Selected solo exhibitions include ‘To Let Stay Projecting as a Bit of Branch on a Log by Not Chopping it Off’, MUMOK, Vienna, ‘Nought to Sixty’ at ICA, London, UK, and ‘Five Kinds of Water’ at Der Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany. Canell was the recipient of the Baloise Kunst Prize at Art Basel Statements in 2009 and the Ars Viva Prize, Germany in 2010.