Utopia # 4672, 2020, oil on canvas , 160 x 210 cm

AUSSTELLUNGSERÖFFNUNG

DONNERSTAG, den 8.Oktober

Angesichts der Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der Corona-
Pandemie verzichten wir auf eine Vernissage und können die Eröffnung nicht wie gewohnt stattfinden lassen.
Jedoch freuen wir uns, Sie am Donnerstag, den 8. Oktober, gemeinsam mit der Künstlerin in
der Zeit zwischen 14-19 Uhr unter Einhaltung der
gegebenen Hygienevorschriften und Verhaltensregeln
begrüßen zu dürfen.

AUSSTELLUNGSDAUER: 8.10. – 28.10.2020
zu den
üblichen Öffnungszeiten

• INNA ARTEMOVA
• 1972              geboren in Moskau
• 1989-1995   Studium Architektur in Moskau (MArchI)
• 1995              Diplom für Architektur, ausgezeichnet mit dem 2. Platz des Architekturpreises der russischen Föderation
• seit 1998      lebt und arbeitet in Berlin als freie Künstlerin

Werk

Ihre Bildwelten haben einen deutlich surrealen Charakter. Es existiert keine scharfe Trennung zwischen Gewesenem , dem Jetzt und Hier oder Hinweisen auf Künftiges. Artemova schöpft aus ihrem persönlichen Erinnerungsraum und  stellt  Verbindungen zu vergangenen Epochen her. Zugleich enthalten die Arbeiten zahlreiche aktuelle Momente und Bezüge zu Utopien. Sie thematisieren das Verhältnis von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, ebenso wie die Art der Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung an zurückliegendes.

Sammlungen

Alison und Peter W. Klein Sammlung

Sammlung Deutsche Bank

INNA ARTEMOVA: TRASFORMATIONS

Let’s split open our figures and place the environment inside them.

Vladimir Yevgraphovich Tatlin (1885-1963)[1]

The visualisation of an explosive structures, fragmentation and material cohesion is powerfully expressed by the oil and canvas works of Inna Artemova. An avidly Russian artist her painted works are embedded in the historical experiences of the utopian-dystopian forces of Revolutionary Russia in the twentieth century. In fact we might even think of her “back to the future” approach expressed in her subject paintings, as the reconfigured paradigm of an investigative eternal recurrence, a concept itself first born as a radical cosmological and futurist supposition [2] In purely visual pictorial terms the idea of the internality of things or forms externalized to view underpins her Utopia paintings.[3] While not all the pictures presented in the current exhibition are from Artemova’s Utopia series, what they all have in common is referent materials emblematic of International Modernism, the explicit language of architecture and forms of the so-called machine age. In grisaille and semi-coloured paintings using an architectural metaphor we are presented with literal visions of construction that are self-polemical deconstructions.[4] The artist takes the constructivist language of the Russian avant garde and subjects it to a personal form of interstitial visualisation. What we see are images that present inter-mediated states of construction within spatial representations that suggest expanded velocity. The word velocity comes to mind because of the explosive and fragmented conditions of the architectonic and machine-like forms placed within exaggerated recessive perspective.

Another aspect that appears in these explosive architectonic and futuristic images is that of displacement. By this one means that the artist Artemova is wrestling with a personal history, and in creating the material states of indeterminate construction she is grappling both with the displaced Soviet Age (no longer existing) and her own displaced reality. The paintings possess great elasticity, which is to say their sense of velocity adds to a sense of temporal elision, almost as if the artist is zoning backwards and forwards through space and memory. For velocity can only exist in time and space, and the central premise of the paintings is the dominant aspect of spatial configuration. This is the reason, perhaps, why so many of the paintings suggest aspects of the cosmological, explosive fusions, a dynamic shattering that borders upon science fiction and those effects we often see in movies. The continuous use of sharp straight lines, rounded ovoids, sputnik or satellite elements, would be Tatlin tower forms, only further the emphasis on volumetric scale where occasional figures become miniscule ciphers of human presence. In Artemova’a materially large and medium scale paintings the pictorial contents are creatively coerced into a greater dominance of what Einstein determined as the space-time continuum.[5] Hence in terms of the artist’s use of composition, we are made aware of the gravitational polarities that bring her pictorial space and time into its continuum. We are presented with a world within a world, the world of both the lived and the imagined, a highly personal sense of what it means to go back to the future.

©Mark Gisbourne

Sunday, 27 September 2020

\

ENDNOTES

[1] Quote cited by Christina Lodder, in Russian Constructivism, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983, p.17 Though it is clear that Tatlin was much influenced by the ideas expresses in his Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912.

[2] Prior to its adoption by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the modern use of “eternal recurrence” begins with the French anarchist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui  (1805-1881) in Eternity by the Stars, New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2013. (Fr. orig. L’éternité par les astres [1873], Paris 2012)

[3] See the essay by Bojana Pejić, “The Space Where Unforeseen Things Take Place”, in Inna Artemova, Reinventing Utopia, 2017

[4] Deconstruction is system of critical analysis of literary and artistic language (in this case Constructivism), focusing of the relational quality of meaning, and the changed assumptions implicit to original forms of expression. See Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds.), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1993For a Derriid-ean view as it related to painting, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, (1987) 2017.

[5] In special relativity time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something. See Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Princeton University Press, 2016