Sommer & Kohl

Eva Berendes
New Schubert Pink

exhibition 3 May – 7 June 2008

In her first solo exhibition at Sommer & Kohl, Eva Berendes (*1974) presents new works from her series of 'folding screens', or 'paravents'.

Berendes uses the format of a folding and freestanding screen as a vehicle to investigate questions of abstract painting and sculpture. Known from the field of applied arts, it was traditionally an important element in Japanese architecture and arrived over the years into the Western world. The dialogue between arts and crafts is a repeated motif in Berendes' oeuvre, which includes installations of hand-painted curtains, rattan sculptures, mirrors and large fabric screens. As becomes apparent from Berendes' practice, abstract art is for her intrinsically tied to the development of applied arts and craft.

In New Schubert Pink, the 'paravents' are presented on pedestals. These underline various possible interpretations of the works as paintings, sculptures or articles of daily use, similar to inverted commas that highlight individual words within a text in order to make visible their meaning in both an actual and a contextual sense.

Based on positions and movements within modernism and her interest in a continually progressing abstract vocabulary, in her latest works Berendes turns to Italian design of the 1980s. For example, Alessandro Mendini's and Ettore Sottsass' keen appropriations of stylistic elements from art deco and the avant-garde are echoed in the symmetry and colouring of the 'paravents'.

The plaster reliefs in the exhibition continue a series of earlier reliefs. Here they are purposefully left raw and under-determined and reveal their production process by showing the imprint of the boarding in which they were cast. Their simplicity recalls fragments of brutalist architecture and forms a discreet counterpoint to the finely elaborated "paravents".

Eva Berendes' works can be seen from 10 May in the group exhibition "Foreground 08: Intervention/Decoration" in Frome, Somerset (UK); from 12 July in the group exhibition "Minimalism and Applied I" from the Daimler Contemporary Collection in the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Würzburg (D); from 10 August in the group exhibition "The Eternal Flame" at Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (CH) and at the end of 2008 in a two-person show with Günter Fruhtrunk at Arndt & Partner, Zürich (CH).

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