Showroom, Gallery Weekend Berlin, 2020
Iman Issa, Surrogates, Kunstmuseum, Sankt Gallen, until 9 August, 2020
Cecilia Edefalk, Homecoming, Norrköppings Konstmuseum, until 17 January, 2021
Showroom, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2020
For Gallery Weekend Berlin & Berlin Art Week, carlier | gebauer, Berlin presents a selection of works dealing with light and movement, including a new sculpture and a new film by Asta Gröting, a new octopus chandelier by Laure Prouvost and a current painting by Marianna Uutinen as well as two iconic works by Michel François and Paul Graham.
Showroom, installation view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2020.
Three Lily Pads translates movement into sculpture. Asta Gröting presents three variations of the same leaf, representing different possibilities, different perspectives. A symbol of purity, abundance, and enlightenment the lily pad’s bloom also holds a venerated position in Eastern spiritual traditions. Yet despite this iconographic legacy, Gröting’s interest lies more in the inherent variability and multiplicity that the lily pad, and by extension its blossom, possess. As philosopher Michael Marder notes, “transgressing traditional boundaries, it is a flower that fuses the vegetal, the human, and the divine […] Its aquatic environment is distinct from the purported stability of soil, in which most other plants are rooted. Like air, liquid cannot be arrested in the molds of identity […] It is prone to transformation.”
Asta Gröting (b. 1961, Herford) lives and works in Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, Kleinplastik Triennale, Fellbach; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria; ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologien, Karlsruhe; n.b.k., Berlin; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and MARTa Herford. She has participated in numerous large-scale international exhibitions, including Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris, James-Simon-Galerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 22nd São Paulo Biennial, the 8th and 14th Biennale of Sydney, and the 44th Venice Biennale. Gröting is a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.
astagroeting.de
#AstaGröting
Asta Gröting, Drei Seerosenblätter, 2019
Polyurethan (elastomer), Epoxidharz/Polyurethan, 145 x 152 x 11 cm
Laure Prouvost’s artistic output consistently returns to themes of escape into unfamiliar worlds or imaginings of unexpected alternative environments. A strong narrative impulse propels her practice, resulting in immersive, transmedial installations with interwoven story lines that combine fiction and reality. Her videos, installations, paintings and tapestries unhinge commonplace and expected connections between language, image, and perception. Stepping away from traditional linear narratives, the artist crafts sensual environments laden with playful mistranslation that open a space for the viewer to grapple with the unstable relationship between imagination and reality. The elasticity of the written word comprises a central element of Prouvost’s practice, stating: “Words for me are very visually powerful, because with words people create their own vision. I am just hinting and suggesting possibilities, the audience is making its own image in its head. It is also about misunderstanding, misinterpreting, miscommunicating - words also suggesting failure and other senses.”
Laure Prouvost, Grandma’s Dream Tentacules Chandelier 2, 2020
80 x 90 cm, unique
Laure Prouvost, Grandma’s Dream Tentacules Chandelier 2, detail, 2020
80 x 90 cm
Here should be a biographie about Laure Prouvost. Her name, date of birth and location where she was born. A line here. A list of exhibitions, information of where she studied and where she lives, a selection of solo show and group shows with dates in brackets following the exhibition title, the place and location, museum shows, names of publications, people who wrote about her work. Galleries that representing her, places that distributes her videos. Words talking about her practice, discribing what her work is about in 4 sentences, a coma and a list of future shows. A list of Residencies and awards. A line. possibly an image of her or an art work.
#LaureProuvost
laureprouvost.com
Marianna Uutinen, Bathroom Stories, 2018
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm
Uutinen’s approach to painting is about materiality and space. Thick layers of acrylic paint are draped across the surface of the canvas to build up a skin-like surface in a non-linear process. Each overlaying gesture negates, blends, and reveals the accumulation of her actions, creating a performative arena in which both a painter and her materials act and react. In her new works, layers of glitter and acrylic paint yield shimmering surfaces that resemble interstellar nebula. Yet Uutinen does not concern herself with the romantic of nature, but rather with proposing a new form of nature. Her recent paintings reveal the dynamism of their materials. Color functions as a non-space, a khôra, which rests between the sensible and intelligible: a space through which everything passes. Constantly shifting and revealing new facets of the work and spaces to enter it, Marianna Uutinen’s recent paintings reveal the animation of matter, proposing a life form through material that reflects melancholia, sex, and death—but also radiant beauty and hope, escapism and banality. If her earlier neon works were like a shout, the subdued palette of her recent paintings are closer to a seething whisper: softly spoken stories about flesh and the stars that take place somewhere between the cosmos and the bathroom floor.
New approaches to storytelling and figuration emerge in Uutinen’s Bathroom Stories and their glittering abstract surfaces evoke countless fleeting memories. The philosopher Jane Bennett describes a life as “a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body.” The non-linear narratives that Uutinen creates in her works emerge from a force field-like space that ensues from her dialogue with materials—and materials’ dialogue with her. Working with glitter and pearlescent paints, Uutinen does not have full control over the optical results of her paintings. Her works relentlessly assert their own materiality, which she develops in turn. The color of the paintings respond to the lighting conditions and the angles that they are viewed from—a reactionary quality that is propelled by their materials. While previous paintings bore traces or imprints of the artist’s own body through her physical interaction with the materials, traces of the figure are now subtly embedded within the composition like a phantom or ghost, a figment of the artist’s imagination or an elusive memory buried beneath mounds of glitter.
Marianna Uutinen (b. 1961, Finland) lives and works in Berlin. Uutinen has exhibited at numerous institutions throughout Europe including Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg; Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; the Moderna Museet, Malmö; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Ludwig Museum, Koblenz; Malmö Konsthall; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. In 1997 Uutinen represented Finland at the Venice Biennale.
Marianna Uutinen, Bathroom Stories, detail, 2018
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm
Michel François, to paint (neon line), 2013
neon, paint, 2 x 600 x 2 cm
Michel François uses an economy of means to transform seemingly uncomplicated objects and materials, or traces of past events, into deeply resonant carriers of meaning. His sculptures can be seen as an exploration of cause and effect, and the ways in which simple gestures can change the status of an object or have important consequences.
Michel François (b.1956, Saint-Trond) lives and works in Brussels. Among countless international exhibitions, he has presented projects at the Havana Biennial (2015), the Belgian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the 22nd São Paulo Biennial (1994) and documenta IX in Kassel (1992). He has had solo exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Haus der Kunst, Munich. He has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Tapei Fine Art Museum, Taipei; Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fondation Hermès, Brussels.
#MichelFrançois
Michel François’ troves consist of materials that he transforms and are in a process of permanent recycling. The presence of outsized objects and the game played with their materials also not only explore ‘who creates sculpture’ but also ‘what sculpture creates’.
Michel François, to paint (neon line), detail, 2013
neon, paint, 2 x 600 x 2 cm