Anne Wenzel
06 Feb - 05 May 2014
ANNE WENZEL
The Opaque Palace
6 February – 5 May 2014
Guest curator Daria de Beauvais
The Opaque Palace is curated by Daria de Beauvais, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
TENT celebrates the reopening of its new exhibition spaces with a solo exhibition by the sculptor Anne Wenzel (D), who lives and works in Rotterdam. The Opaque Palace transforms the exhibition spaces into a total installation in which the dominant themes of her monumental sculptures – power, destruction, heroism, history – are depicted. Daria de Beauvais, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, has curated the exhibition.
From a strong sense of history and political engagement, Anne Wenzel casts new light on the role of art in the representation of power, heroism, and violence. For more than ten years, Wenzel has been developing a distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations in which beauty competes with decay, figuration with abstraction, and power with destruction. The work is characterised through her idiosyncratic use of materials and techniques; by experimenting with extreme sizes, chemical additives, and radical distortions, she pushes the boundaries of the sculptural medium. Wenzel finds inspiration for her work in historical sources, films, literature, and in media images of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and acts of war. Her attention to universal subjects connects her to a growing group of artists who overstep postmodern irony by daring to again engage with existential themes.
The Opaque Palace
6 February – 5 May 2014
Guest curator Daria de Beauvais
The Opaque Palace is curated by Daria de Beauvais, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
TENT celebrates the reopening of its new exhibition spaces with a solo exhibition by the sculptor Anne Wenzel (D), who lives and works in Rotterdam. The Opaque Palace transforms the exhibition spaces into a total installation in which the dominant themes of her monumental sculptures – power, destruction, heroism, history – are depicted. Daria de Beauvais, curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, has curated the exhibition.
From a strong sense of history and political engagement, Anne Wenzel casts new light on the role of art in the representation of power, heroism, and violence. For more than ten years, Wenzel has been developing a distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations in which beauty competes with decay, figuration with abstraction, and power with destruction. The work is characterised through her idiosyncratic use of materials and techniques; by experimenting with extreme sizes, chemical additives, and radical distortions, she pushes the boundaries of the sculptural medium. Wenzel finds inspiration for her work in historical sources, films, literature, and in media images of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and acts of war. Her attention to universal subjects connects her to a growing group of artists who overstep postmodern irony by daring to again engage with existential themes.