Thomas Rentmeister, untitled (2014)
Steel and underwear.
Tag Archives: romance
Carol Bove
Carol Bove, ‘Vague Pure Affection’ (2012)
In Vague Pure Affection (2012), books, photographs, found objects, and small sculptures allude to drug culture and the expanded consciousness that many hoped to achieve through the use of psychedelics. However, Bove has drawn the work’s title from a volume that does not appear on the shelves: the 1901 Theosophist treatise Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. This text, which outlines the shapes and colors of auras associated with various mental states, greatly influenced the invention of abstract painting by Vasily Kandinsky and others.
Nana Kogler
Nana Kogler, ‘Kinoregal’ (2012)
Replica of a cupboard in the cinematheque of Tangier, Morocco. Built after an interior picture by Sarah Keller published in Deutsche Guggenheim Magazin for Yto Barrada’s exhibition ‘Riffs’ in Berlin in 2011. Visit of the original object in the summer of 2013.
Anne Speier
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. “
Gummbah & Chantal Rens
‘When life has no use, it should find a use’. Sweater from the series ‘Nobody Forever’ by Gummbah & Chantal Rens.
Barbara Bloom
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.
