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ARCO MADRID

23.02.2022 – 27.02.2022

We are pleased to welcome you at our joined booth with Galerie Kornfeld.

Booth 7A15

presenting:
Nick Dawes
Kota Ezawa
Christiane Feser
Johanna Reich
Susa Templin

Jan Tichy

Nick Dawes

In his colourfield canvases, the artist strives for a new quality of painterly abstraction. His ability to control complex tonal arrangements and the juxtaposition of irregular shapes give his works their unique and striking appeal. The unified flatness of his paintings also contrive to present us with various possibilities of space – of proximity and distance. Each point sends us shuttling to another area of colour, which in turn persuades us to examine yet a third, and so on. Every painting Nick Dawes creates represents the time it was made in, how he felt and what his influences were in this particular moment. The impossibility of ever recreating this exact emotional state makes each work unique.

The works themselves start out as small drawings and sketches based on texts appropriated from driving instruction manuals and other sign-like quotidian objects. The structure slowly dissolves as the colours begin to penetrate and pour, blurring the boundaries between functionality and abstraction, once solid components flowing into a new vocabulary of fluid entities.

More about Nick Dawes

Kota Ezawa

Kota Ezawa is known for translating and reinterpreting documentary footage – news, film clips, works by other artists, and images stored in our memory – into watercolour animations. Events of historical significance stand on an equal footing with moments of pop culture. Transposed into two-dimensional, literally flat images, Ezawa’s works condense complex visual information into basic elements. Described by the artist as “animated paintings”, they combine a handicraft aesthetic with visual language borrowed from comics and pop art. “Kabul” takes a close-up view of the wall surrounding Kabul airport, an almost insurmountable obstacle. Several people – a child among them – attempt to climb the wall. It is not clear if their escape from the Taliban-ruled country will succeed – as we now know, since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, reaching Kabul airport is no longer a guarantee for salvation.

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Christiane Feser

Within the works of Feser the viewer is presented with an array of visual phenomena. Confronted with an illusionary understanding of what is presented on the “photographic” surface, what Feser’s photo-objects really invite is an investigative relation to the world which encourages aesthetic awareness and changing perspectives.

Trained as an artist focussing on photography as a medium, Feser’s strength lies in her command of light and shadow. After creating compositions out of folded paper, she uses a variety of light sources to add specific shadows to the folded forms which go through another stage of being photographed. The resulting print is then cut up and folded, and at times pins are meticulously placed or thread is woven into the composition, resulting in re-sculpted dizzying networks of geometric landscapes and panoramas. What is important here for Feser is the “emphasis of the lines” and the process of not only recording the moment and the object but instead engaging in an act of “tracing” her structures and essentially reality and life as we see and experience it.

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Johanna Reich

Although Johanna Reich’s work makes use of technological progress and raises questions of post-digital production, she questions and analyses the interaction of human activity and its long-term impact on our environment in the exhibition. While in the age of the Anthropocene man is trying to dominate nature for himself, Johanna Reich points out that our world might one day continue to exist without our species.

The work cycle “the idea of landscape” shows canvases of natural linen covered with few traces of paint; behind the traces of paint words of light shine in pulsating rhythm. Human and machine impact merge: the human gesture of ephemerality leaves a trail of paint with the desire to create a non- painting that serves as the basis for an AI-generated haiku about global warming. The automated haiku can be seen as a current continuation of the French OULIPO movement (L’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), which sought new structures and patterns in literature in the 1960.

More about Johanna Reich

Susa Templin

Susa Templin’s work moves between media and transcends boundaries. The trained painter found her medium in analog photography, yet, like a sculptress, she uses photos of architectural structures to create spatial installations and three-dimensional objects by layering two-dimensional images, which emerge from the wall like sculptures in space and time. Susa Templin’s works are based on her archive of photographed spaces. In her studio, she combines the various photographs in a sculptural fashion, arranging them in space. The images overlap and sometimes eclipse each other, resulting in carefully constructed compositions, which she then photographs. The photos carry traces of the real, while always revealing something new: a never-before-seen reality immanent to the image.

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Jan Tichy

In his text “Social Formalism” (2017), Chicago based artist and educator Jan Tichy describes his works to exist at intersections where forms collide with their circumstances. Social formalism could be described as a socially conscious artistic practice which uses visually formalistic language. The artist often uses archive-based content to link historical layers and values to contemporary issues.

One of the critical questions about a division of a plane comes from the theory on a decomposition of a plane, the research into how shapes form two- dimensional space, that was formulated in Berlin exactly a century ago by Karl Reinhardt, the mathematician who found the first five types of pentagon that can multiply itself into a single plane.

More about Jan Tichy