Sommer & Kohl

Eva Berendes
"A veil, a shadow, a bloom"

exhibition 12 June – 31 July 2010
Wednesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment

Sommer & Kohl are pleased to present the second solo exhibition with new works by Eva Berendes (*1974, Bonn, D).

The artist shows a series of wall-based works made of silk and sculptures made of lacquered steel and brass. She presents these within the frame of a provisional exhibition architecture, which remotely evokes a pavilion.

Squares, circles, polygons and fragmented grid patterns are arranged succinctly on silk foulards. Despite the loose allocation of these shapes there is an attention to overlays, skimpy sections and unusual emphases. The artist places shape and colour constellations precisely within an area that rests between accidental arrangement and concise composition.

The square silk cloths are attached by two small magnets to white metal cross joints which shine through the lucidity of the fabric. This method of attachment only allows for the silk to be stretched up to a point, so that the fabric sags by its own weight. The image carrier, being rather atypical for painterly concerns, thus includes gravity as a subsequent modification within the final composition. It lends the ‘pictures’ an idiosyncratic irregularity, a kind of shortcoming, which confronts the absolutism of the abstract form.

Eva Berendes organises the materials in her exhibition according to the principle of stratification. She staggers paint, silk, metal, plasterboard and wooden grids into spatial ensembles whose layers gradually connect with the exhibition space. Every layer entails its own transparency or opacity, qualities, to which the exhibition title “A veil, a shadow, a bloom” also refers.

Colour-varnished perforated metal plates are serrated and assembled into free-standing sculptures using hinge-joints. Fine brass structures support the sheets from behind. These works also contain the principle of surface permeability and continue to develop aspects from other works, for example the threaded folding screens.

In Eva Berendes’ works the world of applied arts and handicraft is often hinted at. She plays with the change in perspective in the border regions and spaces between established categories. Fine or applied arts, sculpture or painting, modernist or post-modernist abstraction: although her work is characterised by formal rigor and coherence, several diverging viewpoints constantly arise which cannot be reconciled. On the contrary, the works only complete themselves through these antagonisms.

Works by Eva Berendes are on view in the following exhibitions: Bilder über Bilder, aus der Daimler Collection, 
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Vienna, A (until 27 June 2010), The Berlin Box, curated by Friederike Nymphius, Kunsthalle Andratx/CCA, Mallorca, E (until 31 October 2010), The Long Dark, curated by Michelle Cotton, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, GB (17 July until 19 September 2010) and Between The Lines, works by Eva Berendes and Zoe Paul, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex, GB (2 June – 5 September 2010).

For further information and/or images please contact Sommer & Kohl.