Alice Channer, Dagmar Heppner, Alicja Kwade & Maria Zahle
Opening 15th January 2010, 6-8 pm
For the first exhibition of 2010 BolteLang presents four female artists from around Europe. All four artists have similar sculptural practices; their works could be seen as drawing directly into space. “Recognition of the drawing’s power as a medium turns out, unexpectedly,” wrote architectural historian Robin Evans, “to be recognition of the drawing’s distinctness from and unlikeness to the thing that is represented, rather than its likeness to it.” The artists in this exhibition make works independent of, but relating to architecture, blurring the boundaries of drawing by moving into sculptural forms. Alice Channer, Dagmar Heppner, Alicja Kwade and Maria Zahle’s forms exist in dialogue with the exhibition space, taking advantage of the tension between architecture, sculpture and drawing.
Alice Channer (b. 1977, UK) is showing Concentration (2009) at BolteLang, two long pieces of pleated fabric suspended from a wall and the ceiling of the gallery. Channer works with fabric and paper to create works that possess clarity and strength of expression despite her muted media. Printed and pleated fabric, used both as her media and the subject of her drawings, makes minimal, formal installations that retain the controlled aesthetics of fashion and associated connoisseurship. While Channer’s works maintain equilibrium between a relationship to the body and conceptual formality, Dagmar Heppner’s work looks at the borders of individuality. What constitutes a person and where does this become unstable? Heppner (b. 1977, Germany) is showing two bodies of work in the exhibition, one using lacquered fabric to make three-dimensional forms, another group of prints extracted from vintage fashion plates.
The transformation or re-evaluation of domestic materials is also to be found in Maria Zahle’s work. Zahle, (b. 1979, Denmark) is showing a work entitled 90 ̊ Dip (2009) from paper dipped in colour. This simple gesture relates to the glazed sections in the window of BolteLang, reflecting on the window’s function and form. Meanwhile Alicja Kwade (b. 1979, Poland) presents a work, which consists of bent strips of different materials, organic and synthetic, arranged along a wall. The materials are simple, but the gesture is not an attempt at abstraction; a recurring motif in Kwade’s work is her use of materials precisely because of their value. She does not attempt objectivity; the worldly significance of her media, be it unworked materials, cars, cut stones, film clips or gilded charcoal, is a key ingredient in the works rather than something to be overcome.
Aoife Rosenmeyer