Anne Speier, ‘Spice Shrine Giotto Blue’ (2014)
Wood, paint, fabric, spices.
“Inside the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua, there is a fresco by Giotto di Bondione depicting the founder of the church, Enrico Scrovegni, a rich banker, merchant and nobleman.
In the fresco Scrovegni hands over a miniature version of that same chapel to Virgin Mary, hoping that she will forgive his and his families usury misdeeds and hoping they will not send him to purgatory, but take him into heaven. Enrico Scrovegni did not feel ashamed to make his purposes very clear: To get what he wanted he even had his tricky act illustrated on the chapel’s wall.
I have copied some houses in the backgrounds of further frescoes in the chapel as models, but gave them a new function as spice shelves. They do not only contain spices but filling elements of fancy fabrics, meandering and pleated around the spices, embedding them softly into the shell of the shelf, making their patient wait for the moment of employ enjoyable like a long day in bed. “
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, ‘Some object blackened (menshirt)’ (2012)
Men’s shirt and make-up.
Christian Tonner, ‘No Expectations (Violet Bloom)’ (2012)
Leon Eisermann, ‘Oil on Canvas, Canvas on Oil, Oil on Canvas’ (2013)
David Shrigley, ‘Untitled (I am glad)’ (2013)
‘When life has no use, it should find a use’. Sweater from the series ‘Nobody Forever’ by Gummbah & Chantal Rens.
Timm Ulrichs, ‘Der Künstler als Aufseher’ (The Artist as Invigilator) (2009)
Barbara Bloom, ‘Ghost of Vanitas Still Life’ (1994)
BB had a deep affinity for Dutch “Golden Age” painting, a result perhaps of her many years in Amsterdam, but more pertinently of a shared love of the material world. These were painters fascinated by framing: not only in the form of coy devices like the pulled-back drape at the edge of the canvas, but in the literal depiction of framed pictures within their pictures. (We know the artists whose paintings Vermeer owned because he showed them so often in his own paintings.) In David Bailly’s picture, things and pictures are arrayed across the surface of his canvas. Whatever his allegorical intentions, Bailly’s concern with the observable world, in all its idiosyncratic particulars, has trumped conventional narrative. BB’s peekaboo mounting only exacerbates Bailly’s pre-occupation with distracting surfaces and the limpid connections of thoughts and things.
