Eli Cortiñas
08 Sep - 03 Nov 2012
ELI CORTIÑAS
Love is worn around the neck
8 September - 3 November 2012
Originally, Eli Cortiñas worked in film. In her first major project, "Dial M for Mother" (2008), presented at numerous film festivals, she blended scenes showing Gena Rowlands, a big Hollywood star of the sixties and seventies, directed by John Cassavetes, with the recordings of telephone conversations of her own mother. Ever since, the collage of template, cut and superimposition has been the inspiration for the artist's videos, collages and sculptural objects. All these works, in keeping with the formal collage, deal with webs of relationships, also conflicts of relationships, and in the wider sense the relationship of women to their families (mother) and to their social surroundings.
The libidinous aspect here becomes part of a construct in which the carrier of expression, that is the face, is replaced by empty planes. Abstract parts extend on the web of relationships within the scene, to arrive at a more comprehensive automatism. The linked-up world, that which is behind and in front, the curtain opening and closing, as well as storylines of images meanwhile are popping up in new windows. The idea behind this is the repeated perception of objects and situations under changing circumstances, which helps us to gradually decode them. Cortiñas likes to quote the artist Peter Roehr: "I believe that each thing possesses perceptible properties that we take in only rarely, though. When we perceive a thing several times over, arranged horizontally or vertically (in space), or in sequence (in time), we will notice these properties. The message relates to the material's behaviour in relation to the rate of its repetition."
Together with the collage wall, Cortiñas in Innsbruck will present her video Mother Tale #1: Bouton in which a film clip depicts the symbolic beginning of a physical approach, a fly button (a button on a blouse) being undone. The button shines like the partner's face, anonymous and mysterious.
Eli Cortiñas' artistic oeuvre is characterised by a latent surrealism, of the kind long familiar from Spain and Latin America (e.g. Picabia, Dalí, García Márquez). Moreover, there is a strong influence from Buñuel and his successors in those countries. The crucial aspect here has always been the idea that the products of our imagination, at times no less than visionary, are socially relevant and possess a second, ironical layer of meaning. Just as it says on the artist's invitation card: "The expectations of the bourgeoisie are wearing me off." This against a background of objectified abundance and emptiness, and the Spanish insignia of the tambour frame and the eyes of a donkey.
The artist was born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, and also grew up there. She studied at the European Film College in Denmark and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and for six years now has been living and working in Berlin. Her works have been exhibited e.g. at the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. She has taken part in the 58th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen and in Hypercinema! Les Rencontres Internationales at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. At the same time as in Innsbruck, she also has an exhibition at the soy capitán gallery in Berlin and at Galerie Waldburger in Brussels.
To a certain extent, the exhibition of Eli Cortiñas has been conceived to go with "Margret - Chronik einer Affäre."
Love is worn around the neck
8 September - 3 November 2012
Originally, Eli Cortiñas worked in film. In her first major project, "Dial M for Mother" (2008), presented at numerous film festivals, she blended scenes showing Gena Rowlands, a big Hollywood star of the sixties and seventies, directed by John Cassavetes, with the recordings of telephone conversations of her own mother. Ever since, the collage of template, cut and superimposition has been the inspiration for the artist's videos, collages and sculptural objects. All these works, in keeping with the formal collage, deal with webs of relationships, also conflicts of relationships, and in the wider sense the relationship of women to their families (mother) and to their social surroundings.
The libidinous aspect here becomes part of a construct in which the carrier of expression, that is the face, is replaced by empty planes. Abstract parts extend on the web of relationships within the scene, to arrive at a more comprehensive automatism. The linked-up world, that which is behind and in front, the curtain opening and closing, as well as storylines of images meanwhile are popping up in new windows. The idea behind this is the repeated perception of objects and situations under changing circumstances, which helps us to gradually decode them. Cortiñas likes to quote the artist Peter Roehr: "I believe that each thing possesses perceptible properties that we take in only rarely, though. When we perceive a thing several times over, arranged horizontally or vertically (in space), or in sequence (in time), we will notice these properties. The message relates to the material's behaviour in relation to the rate of its repetition."
Together with the collage wall, Cortiñas in Innsbruck will present her video Mother Tale #1: Bouton in which a film clip depicts the symbolic beginning of a physical approach, a fly button (a button on a blouse) being undone. The button shines like the partner's face, anonymous and mysterious.
Eli Cortiñas' artistic oeuvre is characterised by a latent surrealism, of the kind long familiar from Spain and Latin America (e.g. Picabia, Dalí, García Márquez). Moreover, there is a strong influence from Buñuel and his successors in those countries. The crucial aspect here has always been the idea that the products of our imagination, at times no less than visionary, are socially relevant and possess a second, ironical layer of meaning. Just as it says on the artist's invitation card: "The expectations of the bourgeoisie are wearing me off." This against a background of objectified abundance and emptiness, and the Spanish insignia of the tambour frame and the eyes of a donkey.
The artist was born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, and also grew up there. She studied at the European Film College in Denmark and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and for six years now has been living and working in Berlin. Her works have been exhibited e.g. at the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. She has taken part in the 58th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen and in Hypercinema! Les Rencontres Internationales at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. At the same time as in Innsbruck, she also has an exhibition at the soy capitán gallery in Berlin and at Galerie Waldburger in Brussels.
To a certain extent, the exhibition of Eli Cortiñas has been conceived to go with "Margret - Chronik einer Affäre."