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09.07.2017
15.06.2017
14.02.2017
A Decorative Cosmology Bridging Heaven and Earth
In her new exhibition, Tamara Gonzales continues to mine our material culture to chart the world all around.
A view of Tamara Gonzeles’s Ometeotl exhibition (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)
At the heart of Tamara Gonzales‘s new body of work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is a room of tapestries woven by artisans in the Peruvian towns of Písac and Ayacucho. They are vibrant interpretations of the artist’s drawings and they add yet another layer to the decorative language she continues to mine from the material world around her.
Gonzales is known for incorporating visual culture that has traditionally been more associated with lived culture — lace, graffiti, embroidery, textiles — rather than the world of art galleries. A large functional maraca is propped up by the entrance, which signals the inclusive and non-hierarchal attitude towards influence she celebrates in her work.
A large maraca sculpture near the entrance of the exhibition, “Maraca más grande con plumas” (2016)
Past the over-sized maraca, there is a corridor of small drawings dominated by a curvilinear window motif that offers her a compositional frame to puncture, cover, and react to. But even with this structure, the drawings have an experimental energy that pokes and pushes, often jostling forms that resemble easter eggs, stick figures, plants, or the scribblings of a rudimentary language.
Her true subject matter is the material world. She has an indiscriminate appetite for cross-cultural pollination and distills the dissonance of contemporary life into these objects that can seem as jarring as they are soothing.
The title of the exhibition, Ometeotl, refers to a nebulous concept of spirituality that some scholars of Mesoamerican culture dispute, but it is commonly believed to refer to the “creator of all creation” for the Anawak people and a compound of “dual” and “cosmic energy” in the native language of Nahuatl. That ambiguity of the term perfectly reflects the primordial soup that has spawned these works, at once mythic, while relishing their connection to earthly forms.
Looking at her paintings, you can feel unmoored from the boundaries of form as they swim in waves of moody azure, crimson, and the muddy waters of darker hues. The paintings vibrate and ripple in your mind’s eye as they play with proportion — always challenging the relationship of ground and subject — to settle visually like a shaken snow globe. Many of the large paintings, like “Two Moons” (2016), feel contradictory, contrasting the washes of violet paint against the frenzy of patterns that form the sky and ground for a setting Mesoamerican roundel.
The showstoppers, though, are the tapestries. Gonzales’s starry fields and human-like forms are translated into undulating visions of horror vacui. They are her best works yet, offering us a unique synthesis of the world around her but allowing it to develop into these intensely colored objects (she says the women doing the embroidery were given free reign to translate her drawings, based on patterns they normally embroider). The works, which are all untitled and made of alpaca and wool, convey a sense of cosmic cartography. If anything, the embroideries make the paintings seem more conventional, showing how her many bodies of work may overlap but travel in different directions.
The paintings are declarations of the known, the drawings are suggestions of what can be known, while the woven works are proposals for what we may never ever truly know.
Tamara Gonzales, “Two Moons” (2016)
Tamara Gonzales, “I Am the Hummingbird” (2016)
The room of embroidered works
Tamara Gonzales’s untitled drawing (2015) and the related untitled tapestry (2016)
Untitled tapestry (2016)
A view of Tamara Gonzeles’s Ometeotl exhibition (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)At the heart of Tamara Gonzales‘s new body of work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is a room of tapestries woven by artisans in the Peruvian towns of Písac and Ayacucho. They are vibrant interpretations of the artist’s drawings and they add yet another layer to the decorative language she continues to mine from the material world around her.
Gonzales is known for incorporating visual culture that has traditionally been more associated with lived culture — lace, graffiti, embroidery, textiles — rather than the world of art galleries. A large functional maraca is propped up by the entrance, which signals the inclusive and non-hierarchal attitude towards influence she celebrates in her work.
A large maraca sculpture near the entrance of the exhibition, “Maraca más grande con plumas” (2016)Past the over-sized maraca, there is a corridor of small drawings dominated by a curvilinear window motif that offers her a compositional frame to puncture, cover, and react to. But even with this structure, the drawings have an experimental energy that pokes and pushes, often jostling forms that resemble easter eggs, stick figures, plants, or the scribblings of a rudimentary language.
Her true subject matter is the material world. She has an indiscriminate appetite for cross-cultural pollination and distills the dissonance of contemporary life into these objects that can seem as jarring as they are soothing.
The title of the exhibition, Ometeotl, refers to a nebulous concept of spirituality that some scholars of Mesoamerican culture dispute, but it is commonly believed to refer to the “creator of all creation” for the Anawak people and a compound of “dual” and “cosmic energy” in the native language of Nahuatl. That ambiguity of the term perfectly reflects the primordial soup that has spawned these works, at once mythic, while relishing their connection to earthly forms.
Looking at her paintings, you can feel unmoored from the boundaries of form as they swim in waves of moody azure, crimson, and the muddy waters of darker hues. The paintings vibrate and ripple in your mind’s eye as they play with proportion — always challenging the relationship of ground and subject — to settle visually like a shaken snow globe. Many of the large paintings, like “Two Moons” (2016), feel contradictory, contrasting the washes of violet paint against the frenzy of patterns that form the sky and ground for a setting Mesoamerican roundel.
The showstoppers, though, are the tapestries. Gonzales’s starry fields and human-like forms are translated into undulating visions of horror vacui. They are her best works yet, offering us a unique synthesis of the world around her but allowing it to develop into these intensely colored objects (she says the women doing the embroidery were given free reign to translate her drawings, based on patterns they normally embroider). The works, which are all untitled and made of alpaca and wool, convey a sense of cosmic cartography. If anything, the embroideries make the paintings seem more conventional, showing how her many bodies of work may overlap but travel in different directions.
The paintings are declarations of the known, the drawings are suggestions of what can be known, while the woven works are proposals for what we may never ever truly know.
Tamara Gonzales, “Two Moons” (2016)Tamara Gonzales, “I Am the Hummingbird” (2016)The room of embroidered worksTamara Gonzales’s untitled drawing (2015) and the related untitled tapestry (2016)Untitled tapestry (2016)
06.02.2017
Willem de Rooij: Blue to Black (2013) and Black to Blue (2015)
In particular, two large-scale sublime textiles Blue to Black (2013) and Black to Blue (2015) trace the global legacy of the Dutch colonial project, looking at textile industries in Ghana and Indonesia where one of the two works was produced with the support of the IMA. More recent developments in de Rooij’s work with hand-woven fabrics can be seen in the series of seven stretched textiles shaped as tangrams (a Chinese dissection puzzle). In this body of work from 2015, hand-spun thread in two colours form the warp and weft to create rich monochromes. Also investigating the ambiguous relations between colour and "meaning" is the iconic work Orange, created by de Rijke/de Rooij in 2004 (his collaboration with Jeroen de Rijke, 1994–2006). This series of slides use a single colour to make reference to an expansive range of subjects. Bouquet XVI (2015), is a monumental dried floral arrangement, sourced locally, that reveals the artist’s multilayered and complex approach to materials and concepts, referencing climate, drought, and the still-life tradition so prominent in Dutch art history. In a surreal twist, Farafra (2013), extends the presence of the natural world through sound.
Since 2009, the artist has taken his inspiration from the structural polarity of woven fabric and thus initiated a reflection around contrast and nuance. These weavings aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. For this exhibition, Willem de Rooij presents four handwoven works and a large wax print on cotton.
Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, these woven works are created by use of different mixtures of synthetic polyester sewing thread. Conceived as one installation, the five works make use of the same two colors : black and blue.
The monochromatic appearance of the weavings on closer inspection reveals a gradual transition from one shade of colour to another. The colorimetric modulations facilitate constant shifts in the viewer’s perception of the works on show. Taken in their entirety, they embody sameness as well as difference, the individual and the collective.
The weavings presented at the Chantal Crousel Gallery are part of a larger series, for the creation of which Willem de Rooij restrained himself to a limited number of colors and sizes. The titles of the works, often anagrams derived from names of locations or persons connected to the work add to the myriad cross-references between the various works in this series.
Produced especially for this exhibition, the wax print Blue to Black reminds of former colonial trade-routes and the resulting migration patterns between Asia, Africa and Europe.
In the 19th century Dutch colonial trading companies industrialized the traditional Indonesian Batik fabric printing process. While buyers in Indonesia proved resistant to the mechanical produce, new markets opened in West Africa, where the printed fabrics remain popular also today. Blue to Black was produced by the Ghana Textile Printing Company (GTP) in Tema, Ghana. GTP is owned by a Dutch firm even today; in this line of industry, ancient colonial structures are still at work.
Over the last five years, the notion of "referentiality", or the development of strategies to bypass external references became important elements in de Rooij’s work. Throughout his career, the artist has analyzed the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between sociopolitical and autonomous image production.
About the artist
Willem de Rooij, born 1969 in Beverwijk, the Netherlands, now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. De Rooij studied art history at the University of Amsterdam and art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and Guest Advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. In 2014 he was nominated for the Vincent Award, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague. Recent solo exhibitions include: Entitled (2016), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; The Impassioned No (2015), Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Character Is Fate (2015) Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (2014), Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings(2014), the Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Farafra (2013), Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Untitled (2012) at Kunstverein München, Munich; Crazy Repelled Firelight (2011), Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, USA; and Intolerance (2010) at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
26.01.2017
Fiona Tan: Nellie (2013)
Es ist eben der Wandschrank, in dem Tan die Uraufführung ihres Videos installierte. Das Zimmer befindet sich im Museum Van Loon, das heute die bürgerliche Wohnkultur des Goldenen Zeitalters ausstellt. Das Museum war das Wohn- und Geschäftshaus der Familie Van Loon, die im 18. Jahrhundert als Finanziers von den Handelsbeziehungen zu Batavia profitierten. Dieses Haus, dessen erster Bewohner Ferdinand Bol ausgerechnet ein Schüler Rembrandts war, diente Tan als Drehort. Hier inszenierte sie Nellies ewiges „Dazwischenleben“, ihre Situation, aus der heraus sie nur aus dem Fenster starren, mit Briefen korrespondieren oder in Fieberträume versinken konnte. In einer Sequenz zitiert Tan Jan Vermeers berühmtes, 1657 entstandenes Gemälde Briefleserin am offenen Fenster. Vermeer malte es, als Nellie noch ein kleines Kind war. Bei Tan ist es weniger ein kunstgeschichtliches Zitat als sozialgeschichtliche Information. Nellies Gefängnis ist real: „In Batavia, dem heutigen Jakarta“, sagt Tan, „litt sie wahrscheinlich an Malaria. Sie konnte bestimmt nicht alleine aus dem Haus, um auf den Markt zu gehen und ihre Nachbarschaft zu sehen.“
28.12.2016
19.08.2016
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