GIRL MEETS GIRL NORWAY

NO BOUNDARIES WHEN GIRL MEETS GIRL

For the show 'Girl meets Girl' at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway: 7 May - 25 September 2022 - Curators: Paul Carey-Kent, Jinhee Choi, Sunhee Choi and Jari Lager.

 

(my material, as used in producing the printed catalogue, which includes installation shots etc)

 

Girl Meets Girl presents 25 international artists who have arrived at distinctive

languages which they employ with a freshness and panache which reads as

spontaneity. They don’t worry about boundaries: between life and fiction, between

sexes and sexualities, between conscious and subconscious, between first person

and mediated, between representation and abstraction. The world is all grist to their

technical confidence and freedom of wills.

 

Naturally, that freshness of approach can apply to pretty much any area of art and

life. Just so, the artists might be loosely grouped as addressing portraiture, sex, the

interface between the human and the natural, how the world can form the basis for

abstraction, and other aspects of everyday life. All the artists are female. This can be

taken as an opportunity to rectify the historic, and indeed still current, position

whereby male artists have been more frequently shown in galleries and more highly

valued in the market. Yet this is primarily a show which moves beyond making a

point of that to provide an opportunity to generate connections and conversations

across the lively practices of these 25 artists.

 

Several of them might be seen as showing how women portray women. There are

radical depictions of how women create their own self-sufficient world, reflect on

bodily experience, or counteract the historical expectations of female roles. Caroline

Walker focuses on women within psychologically charged public spaces. Helena

Parada Kim muses on the factors behind personal identity in an internationalised

world. Vivian Greven finds personal intimacy in a combination of classical, pop, and

digital registers. Rosa Loy has a folkloric vision for strengthening the role of women

in society.  

 

A similarly assertive and uninhibited view is taken of sex. Corinne von Lebusa’s

characters tease the voyeuristic viewer. Rosie Gibbens’ films display a brazen and

pointed conjunction of sex and humour. Aurora Reinhard cuts through classical myth

and popular culture to present herself as a counter to one-dimensional views of

women. Urara Tsuchiya’s uninhibited ceramics challenge us to decide where our

boundaries lie between public and private. 

 

Woman meets nature in works that examine how human can identify with animal and

the metaphorical potential that creates. Rose Wylie stretches her distinctive

worldview into a snake ten canvasses long. Lee Won-Kyoung and Saelia Aparicio

Torinos both merge vegetable, animal, and human attributes. Katherine Bernhardt‘s

pictographic toucan takes flight through electric colour. Annie Morris’s work courses

with life across several media. 

 

Other artists move away from naturalism, yet retain telling connections to the real

world from which they are abstracting. Camilla Løw plays games with constructivist

and Bauhaus sources. Ina Gerken gives a fresh context to the language of abstract

expressionism. Cornelia Baltes makes us wonder how far her abstraction

has really gone. Martine Poppe paints clouds, halfway between abstraction and

representation. Jenny Brosinski’s deconstructions of painterly language constitute a

fleeting encounter with “what if?”  In the stairwell, Juliette Mahieux Bartoli’s immense

and apparently abstract hanging silks turn out to use space exploration to explore

space.

 

The last loose grouping of women sees personal meet political and private meet

public across a wide cross-section of life concerns. Johanna Reich explores the interface of

physical and digital and its impact on everyday life. Wanda Koop addresses, rather

beautifully, our encroachment on the natural world. Yu Jinyoung provides a much

more introspective take on related issues. Emma Cousin’s women act out the

comedy of how the body works. Katherine Bradford’s characters dive into mysterious

journeys. Liane Lang considers the place of women in history and how that has been

represented.  

 

Consistent with the artists’ general unwillingness to be constrained by boundaries,

there is plenty of crossover. That makes sense: when girl meets girl, they speak to

each other through the many ideas in play.

Cornelia Baltes  

                                   Miet, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas 230 x 170 x 3 cm 

Jeg, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas, 230 x 170 x 4 cm

                                 Mina, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas, 230 x 170 x 4 cm

Cornelia Baltes states that the general source of her work ‘is the observation of daily life. I point out small things that touch me and create work that combines simplicity with a sense of humour.’ Just so, she extracts the essence of such encounters to test how far she can push her clean graphic sensibility and suggestively elusive titles towards abstraction while drawing us in to their possible figurative subjects. You can read a face into 'Miet', but also a handbag, which might fit a title that means 'rent' - does the bag hold the rent money?  'Jeg' is a rare word for machinery in English, 'Mina' could be a name... But such possibilities merely tantalise. These playful works, according to Galleri Nicolai Wallner, offer a visual conundrum which ‘constantly shifts between recognition and obscurity’.   

                

Cornelia Baltes (1978, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2011. Her solo exhibitions include at EIGEN + Art, Berlin (2021), Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen (2020 and 2017), Frutta; Glasgow Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; and Bolte Lang, Zurich (2018), Limoncello, London (2013 and 2016) and the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK (2013). 

Juliette Mahieux Bartoli   

Extrasolar, 2021 - Cyanotype on silk – site specific dimensions in show, illustration from series is 260 x 140cm

The delicate silks soaring from bottom to top of the staircase are cyanotypes derived from technical drawings of spacecraft – appropriately enough, as the process was the go-to 19^th century means of producing copies of engineering and architectural plans, termed ‘blueprints’. That brings to mind the comparable contrast between the protective hardware of the spacecraft and the vulnerability of astronauts as they travel into the deep blue. Mahieux Bartoli immerses bolts of chiffon and organza in photosensitive solution, places multiple templates made from the blueprints onto the silk, and leaves the sun to turn the uncovered zones blue. The resulting intricately criss-crossing marks have an abstract quality which exploits variations in focus and exposure, but they also cohere into the massive yet weightless form of complicated spaceships. As Mahieux Bartoli explains, 'the process of transformation from idea to sign to object (the process of inception to blueprint to material product) is a mechanism of inverted abstraction (object to sign to idea)'. 

Juliette Mahieux Bartoli (born 1989, Italy) grew up between Paris, Washington DC, Geneva, and Rome, eventually settling in the UK.  She studied at the University of Cambridge and City & Guilds of London Art School. She has had solo shows - mainly of paintings -  in London and Berlin with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and her work was part of the Benetton Imago Mundi exhibition, currently travelling internationally. Among recent group shows is 'A Fine Day for Seeing' at Southwark Park Galleries in 2021.

Katherine Bernhardt  

Untitled, 2018 - Acrylic on paper, 45.7 x 60.7 cm

Katherine Bernhardt’s pictographic paintings operate at the sloppy end of spontaneity, employing acrylic and spray paint to depict everyday items and wildlife with sufficient vim to make them more riffs on signification than analyses of what is signified – excuses for painting electric colours and humming shapes, rather than subjects as such. Using a language she arrived at via the influences of fashion and Moroccan rugs, Bernhardt embraces the world’s stream of images, and her frequent locations of Brooklyn and Puerto Rico, with enough often-tropical warmth to make them her own. Here she shows a toucan, enabling her to match the painting's free and easy vibe with the liberating potential of flight. And the ebulliently colourful vibe is ideal for local schoolchildren to pick up in their own versions. 

                           

Katherine Bernhardt (1975, St. Louis, Missouri, United States ) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA in 1998 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA in 2000 at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2018, the solo exhibition Katherine Bernhardt: Watermelon World was on view at the Mario Testino Museum (MATE) in Lima, Peru. The previous year, in 2017, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas presented FOCUS: Katherine Bernhardt. Also in 2017, the artist painted a 60 foot-long mural entitled XXL Superflat Pancake for the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum. Bernhardt has created a permanent installation for Club Caribe, Cidra, Puerto Rico and a pool painting at the Nautilus South Beach, Miami Beach (both 2015). In spring 2022 she has a solo exhibition of new work at David Zwirner Gallery, London. 

 

Katherine Bradford  

Somersault, 2018 - Acrylic on canvas, 182.9 × 139.7 cm

Tub Under Planet, 2018 - Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 × 172.7 cm

Trophies, 2018 - Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 × 172.7 cm

Katherine Bradford’s elusively anonymous figures are engaged in off-kilter sporting activities: what looks like assisted acrobatics, night-boat racing and a multi-cup award ceremony for the faceless. All use a recent palette of moody pinks and blues, in which the shadowless light and floating lack of perspective are more enchanted than real. Bradford is 80, but retains a positively girlish freshness in her application of paint, which seems pretty relaxed about whether the intent of a particular mark is figurative or abstract. And though one can read psychological possibilities into her characters and their curious interactions, the sense is that the paint, rather than its narrative, is what matters most to her. Bradford favours acrylic. The fluorescent colours and watery textures suit her dreamy washes, the undercurrents of which in her words – ‘serve as a metaphor for whatever we’re floating on, and jumping into, and travelling through’. Freud read water as the subconscious, and that air of mysterious inner journeying remains when Bradford’s characters reach dry land or high air.

Katherine Bradford (1942, New York) lives and works in New York. She studied at the State University of New York, Purchase, NY (MFA) and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania (BA). Her recent solo and two person exhibitions include at Kaufman Repetto, Milan (2021), Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont (2020), Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon and  Campoli Presti,  London and Paris (2019); Galerie Haverkampf, Berlin (2016 and 2018); CANADA, New York (2016, 2018 and online in 2020); Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oreogon (2014, 2016 and 2018) and Anat Egbi, Los Angeles (2018); Galerie Haverkampf, Berlin, Germany, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan, Italy and Sperone Westwater, New York (2017) and Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2015) 

Jenny Brosinski   

I be movin on, 2020 - Oil, oil stick, olive oil, spray paint, charcoal and 
fabric on canvas in oak frame, 200 x 152 cm

Was it obvious to everybody else, 2020 - Oil, oil stick, olive oil, charcoal on canvas, oak framed, 200 x 152 cm

Jenny Brosinski describes painting as ‘a fleeting encounter with what if’, suggesting an abstracted testing-out of the world's possibilities. That leads to 'a kind of neo-expressionist-minimalism' in which Cy Twombly, Michel Majerus and Michael Krebber are evident influences. She creates and then deconstructs and reconfigures, seeking new possibilities from original arrangements of irregular lines, abstract marks, scraps of text, ambiguous shapes and also, sometimes, famous cartoons. Brosinski restricts the gestures and maximises the exposure of raw ground to generate an air of provisionality. Her aim, she says, is to embody ‘deconstruction’ through compositions that ‘deliberately reveal traces of use, whereby the nature of their materiality is brought to the foreground.’ These two examples show how the face-off operates between a spontaneously ad hoc appearance and the mindful balance which lies beneath.

Jenny Brosinski (1984, Celle, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the   Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin, 2006–2010. Her solo exhibitions include at the   Choi & Lager Gallery, Seoul  (2019); Nevven Gallery, Göteborg, Denmark; POP68, Cologne, and  Zweisieben, Karlsruhe,  Germany (2018);   Galleria Annarumma, Naples and Galerie Schacher – Raum für Kunst, Stuttgart, Germany (2017) and Geukens & De Vil Knokke, Antwerp, Belgiam (2016). 

Emma Cousin   

Air Line, 2022 - oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm

Conductor, 2022 - oil on canvas, 110.5 x 70cm

Look North, 2022: oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm

Emma Cousin's paintings and drawings investigate the ways in which human experience, relationships and communication between the self and others are structured.  Here she shows a triangle of three works that themselves incorporate triangles into the mix, wittily exploring what the formal device might stand for - directionality, vision, noses, light etc - and also pushing the triangle to the limits of elongation. Cousin explains that she 'responds to the restrictions and humour of language, using ideation to explore meaning and articulate the complexities of human experience and emotions in order to consider how we might interact without it'. Here we might be looking towards future possibilities, wondering what being human - or even post-human - will look and feel like. Perhaps, she suggests, these characters are  trying to recreate the compass...

Portrait: Faris Mustafa

Emma Cousin (1986, Yorkshire, UK) studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University 2004-2007.Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University BA Hons.2004-2007 and Skowhegan School of Painting, 2018. Her solo shows include at Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (2021) White Cube (online) and Goldsmith's CCA, London (2020) Milton Keynes Art Centre (2019) and Edel Assanti Gallery, London (2018), and she was part of the Jerwood 'Survey' show which toured Britain in 2018-19. 

Ina Gerken  

Familia, 2022 - acrylic and silk paper on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

Maybe late summer, 2022 - acrylic and silk paper on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

'The sublime harmony contained in expression', says her Finnish gallery, Makassini Contemporary, 'is wordlessly articulated in Ina Gerken’s ethereal art, through both line and colour. The line searches and fumbles, but does not lose control'. Often, the painting is given extra structure by the addition of Japanese paper, fixed to some parts of the surface. That adds to the ambiguity of space already characteristic of her use of acrylic on canvas. It is apparent that Gerken works within the abstract expressionist tradition.  However, the paintings’ idiosyncratic colour theory produces a rich chromaticism that - combined with her varied grounds and laconically articulated, ambivalently gestural application of paint - provides a novel setting for effects akin to Hoffman's push and pull. 

Ina Gerken (1987 Speyer, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. She studied fine art at Kunsthochschule Mainz (2007-13) and painting at Düsseldorf’s Art Academy (2014-2016). Her recent solo shows have been at Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2018 and 2020); The Cabin, Los Angeles (2019); Achenbach Hagemeier, Berlin and Dusseldorf ; NAM project, Milan (2017) and Gallery Golestani, Düsseldorf (2015). She also participated in the exhibition project NOW! Painting in Germany Today, that showed works from young German artists in four museums across Germany in 2019.

Rosie Gibbens  

 

 Still from SeDUCKtion, 2019

 

Still from Professional Body, 2018

 

Stills from Domestic Bliss, 2017

Rosie Gibbens is a performer (often with absurd body parts) and film maker who displays a brazen and pointed conjunction of sex and humour. SeDUCKtion documents her pondside attempt to attract some ducks using a speculum with lipstick as a beak, washing-up gloves as webbed feet, and a repetitive dance. The register is complicated by the voice-over: a child reads extracts from genuine online discussions comparing the sexiness of Daisy Duck and Minnie Mouse. Professional Body sees her getting intimate with an office chair, which might act as a parody of the workplace romance, while both Brush and Domestic Bliss make ingeniously inappropriate use of everyday items, lampooning the ubiquity of the sexual. The overall effect is an entertaining reductio ad absurdum of the very possibility of constraining women within defined roles.

Rosie Gibbens in her 'Blinds' performance, photograph by Manuel Vason

Rosie Gibbens (1993, UK) graduated from an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art (2018) and a BA in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins (2015). She lives in London. Her first solo exhibition was at the Zabludovic Collection, London in 2021.  Recent group exhibitions include: The Artist is Online, König Gallery, Berlin (2021); Hot Air, Bad Art presents, London (2021); Recreational Grounds, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (2021); Ridiculous, Elephant West, London (2020); Antisocial Isolation, Saatchi Gallery, London (2020); Salon Acme, Mexico City (2020); Absinthe 3, Collective Ending, London (2019).

Vivian Greven  

        

  

ex, 2019 - oil and acrylic on canvas, 150 x 105 cm

Chak II, 2021 - oil and acrylic on canvas, 80 × 60 cm

X XI, 2021 - oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm

Vivian Greven characterises her theme as 'painted love', which she filters through ancient Graeco-Roman statues and pastel colours, bringing a classical calm to her androgynous figures. Yet they also suggest pop art and how the idealisation of the human body found throughout art history culminates in our current digital world. That valuation of beauty, says Greven 'is connected to the idea of holiness and holiness in turn is connected to the universe, where death and life are lovers'. The results can be either direct or ethereal, reflecting how the translucency of marble has historically made it the favoured stone for sculpting the nude. As Victor Hugo put it: 'In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh'. Indeed, Vivian sees her painted surfaces as skin-like membranes, allowing her to 'concentrate on its direct surficial appearance but also on the volume of the body, which moves underneath'.

               

Vivian Greven (born Bonn, Germany, 1985) has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Langmatt, Kunstpalais Erlangen, Kunstverein Heidelberg and Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai, as well as group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Kai10 Arthena Foundation Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Paula Modersohn Becker Museum, Bremen and Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Vivian Greven is currently a guest professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe. A comprehensive solo exhibition is planned for spring 2023 at the Neue Galerie Gladbeck.

Yu Jinyoung  

Me & Them #3, 2014 - Poly vinyl chloride, Fibre-reinforced plastic, max 153cm high

the LIFE #1, 2016 - Poly vinyl chloride, Fibre-reinforced plastic, max 110 cm high 

Me & Them #5, 2014 - Poly vinyl chloride, Fibre-reinforced plastic, max 147cm high

Yu Jinyoung’s life-sized figures use PVC to generate maximum transparency. That provides a telling way to suggest the inner life of her characters. In her words: 'My works are about people who, instead of getting along with others, choose to keep a distance from them, and be invisible or be left alone unconcerned. Instead of trying to fit into the world, they climb into a space of their own and reject other people’s intrusions.  On the one hand, that transparency - reinforced by the mask-like faces - suggests that longing to disappear; on the other hand, it might remind us that we can never be quite sure how much of people’s inner lives we understand from outside.  None of the figures here appears alone, but are they just repeating aspects of one person - at different times, in different places?  Whatever the case, the mood is playful, yet melancholy.

Yu Jinyoung (born Seoul, 1977) lives and works in Seoul. She holds a Master's degree in sculpture at the Sungshin Women's University, Seoul. She has exhibited internationally in Korea, Japan and Europe, including solo shows at Choi & Lager Gallery, Cologne, (2013 and 2018) Art Merge Lab, Los Angeles (2015) and Patricia Armocida Gallery, Milan (2013).

Helena Parada Kim  

Anna K.E., 2011 - oil on linen, 180 x 115 cm

Lina Franko, 2019/20 - oil on linen 185 x 250 cm 

Iwajla Klinke, 2014 - oil on linen, 170 x 130 cm

As a Spanish-Korean brought up in Germany, Helena Parada Kim refuses to identify with a single nationality, consistent with her interest in shifting identity. Taking her cue from elegant, feminine figures dressed in the traditional Korean costumes in her mother´s photography albums, she concentrates on portraits. Initially, Parada Kim used the Korean material directly, as echoed in the recent Three Women, which shows the artist herself with her mother and aunt, against a Korean screen painting. Helena has gone on to portray the typically shifting and mixed worlds of her artist friends.  In Anna K.E. she paints the German-Georgian into a version of Zurbarán's St Margaret of Antiochia, in which the saint boldly faces off the threat - perhaps of male aggression - symbolised by the dragon. Lina Franko shows another artist friend, together with her poodle, in a studio - her little cosmos - she has just learned she will have to give up. Iwajla Klinke is posed in front of an empty shop in Berlin: both the style and her androgynous appearance echo portraits, by such Neue Sachlichkeit painters as Christian Schad or Lotte Laserstein, of the new type of woman emerging in the Weimar Republic.

Helena Parada Kim (1982, Cologne, Germany), lives and works in Berlin). She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2002-09), and has had solo shows at Choi&Lager Gallery, Cologne (2016 and 2021), Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Germany (2019), Choi&Lager Gallery, Seoul (2018), the Korean Cultural Centre, Madrid (2018) Galerie Tristan Lorenz, Frankfurt (2015), Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf (2010) and Kunstverein Recklinghausen, Recklinghausen, Germany (2009).

Wanda Koop    

Standing Withstanding, 2020 - acrylic on canvas, 213 x 135 cm

BREAKING NEWS: Midday in Eden (Mauve) -  acrylic on canvas, 213 x 135 cm

Beauty is troubling in Wanda Koop's large, layered paintings. She works in series, and these two are part of what the ardent community activist calls 'an investigation into the contemporary understanding of Landscape, in particular as a vehicle for addressing cultural encroachment upon and destruction of the so called natural world'.  Her 'Dreamline' series features precisely painted drips which represent tears, yielding a compelling formal device which is also a lament for the planet and how our actions impact on it.  The flames of 'Standing Withstanding' echo the  double drip tear form,  evoking more directly the effect of the oil industry and the Dakota pipeline protests in particular. 'Midday in Eden' conjoins a constricted and denuded tree form with an irruption of abstraction into the landscape, which might act as an indicator of human intervention, as well as operating in formal terms.

 

Wanda Koop (1951, Vancouver) studied at the University of Manitoba School of Art and lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada. She has had more than sixty solo shows, including recently at Notre Dame de Paris; Division Gallery, Toronto; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (2019) Franklin Parrasch Gallery; New York, Division Gallery, Montreal; Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2018), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Canadian Embassy, Washington (2016).  She is the Founder / Honorary Chair of Art City (Inner-city visual arts youth centre) in Winnipeg and is a Member of the Order of Canada (C.M.). 

Liane Lang  

Sissi Debris, Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary, 2019 - print on building rubble, 70 x 40cm

                               

Empress Josephine, 2021 - Print on marbled plaster, 50 x 62cm

                                   

Joan of Arc, 2019 - Print on stucco marble and wood, 70 x 40 cm

Paulina Borghese, 2019 - Print on plaster & resin, 51 x 37cm 

Also shown: Sophie Scholl Print on marbled polymer 45 x 45cm and Marie Antoinette print on coloured marble slab 28cm x 56cm

These works come from Liane Lang’s project ‘Glorious Oblivion’, exploring how women have been represented in public statues and monuments throughout Europe, and seeking to revive their histories. Lang photographs mannequins – a humbler form of the statue – in contact with monuments, as if reaching beyond their cold formality to establish new physical connections with the past. She prints the images onto such unexpected and often fragmented surfaces as shards of marble and lumps of cement – echoing the fragility of the memories these monuments are intended to guard. Lang found that, if the female subject was not a monarch, she was most likely a martyr – as if women were admitted into history only through tragedy. 

Liane Lang (born Munich, 1973) studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and completed a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy. She has had recent solo shows at the James Freeman Gallery in London and the Lianzhou Festival of Photography. In 2019 her major installation 'We're All In This Together' was shown at the Kunsthalle Tubingen. During 2019 she was based at BilbaoArte, and was a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation in 2021. She was also artist in residence for the Wirkswirth Festival in England in 2021, leading to an exhibition due in 2022.

Corrine von Lebusa  

Independent Beauty, 2014 - mixed media on cardboard, 40x30cm

La Baie Des Anges, 2021 - mixed media on cardboard, 50x40cm

Bedtime Story, 2017 - mixed media on cardboard, 50x40cm

Whoever comes in is inside #2, 2018 - Mixed media on cardboard, 40 x 30 cm (#6 and #9 in the series are also shown)

'What a pleasure it is', says Rosa Loy of her Leipzig sister-in-art, 'to see an obviously figural, i.e. real, world presented in such an unreal way. It is up to us to project our own being onto this unreality. Here the artist offers us a creative sphere in which philosophy, artificiality, reality, femininity and science are able to create something new through chemical union'.  Corrine von Lebusa conjures characters we seem to have stumbled on unawares, but so charming is her use of watercolour, oil paints, crayons, various inks and diverse varnishes,  it is hard to feel troubled by our potentially inappropriate presence. A recent series shows  women in striped leotards tumbling and stretching together. They seem more aware of - and playing up to - the viewer as they peer cheekily between their own legs. These jesting characters seem, like the paintings, to be teasing us but just beyond our ability to pin down quite what they are about. 

  
Portrait by Carina Linge

Corrine von Lebusa (1978, Herzberg, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig. She studied fashion and graphic design at Burg Giebichenstein, Halle (Germany) to 1998, and painting 2001-08 at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, taking her diploma with Prof. Neo Rauch. She has had solo shows at Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig (2021, 2015 and 2018), , Jarmuschek & Partner, Berlin (with Inga Kerber, 2021), Galerie Levy, Hamburg (2017), Ostdeutscher Sparkassenverband, Berlin (2016). Her group shows include 'Killer Cute', De Beor Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), 'Sex U.L.', Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig (2020) and 'The Leipzig Connection', Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb (2019).

Camilla Løw  

High Rise, 2020 (installation at Isca Gallery, Oslo)

Informer, 2020 - Concrete, spray paint 30 x 30 x 60 cm

New Light, 2020 - Concrete, spray paint 30 x 30 x 120 cm

Resistance, 2020 - Concrete, spray paint, steel and wheels 50 x 50 x 71 cm

Machines (Black), 2020 Concrete, steel, wheels 30 x 30 x 120 cm

The building blocks of Camilla Løw’s language will be familiar from classic constructivist and Bauhaus sources and the way that has fed into architecture with utopian aspirations. Hence the sharp geometry, primary colours, formal simplicity and frequent use of concrete. That may sound rather worthy and controlled, but the works turn out to be jauntily expressive in their interactions with each other and their environments. Løw also envisages them as relative to human presence: 'Sometimes it is about losing the form in space, then gathering the shape and form together again through the movement and positioning of the viewer'. The modular sculptures and wheeled metal bases of High Rise evoke the construction of society's infrastructures, but do so with an unexpected collision of concrete and colour, playfully belying the rawness and weight of their material. We're put  on a stage to play our roles alongside Løw's sculptural actors.

 

Camilla Løw lives and works in Oslo. She attended Asker Kunstfagskole (1996-98) and Glasgow School of Art (1998-2001, BA (Hons) Fine Art, Sculpture). Her solo shows include at Isca, Oslo (2020), Belmacz, London (2014 and 2019), Fullersta Gård, Huddinge, Sweden (2018), Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2016), Elastic Gallery, Stockholm (2015) and the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2012).

Rosa Loy  

Tree Garden, 2011 Casein on canvas,220 x 180 cm

Dream Guards,  2012 - Casein on canvas, 33x24cm

White Escape, 2012 - Casein on canvas, 33x24cm

Rosa Loy’s dreamily allegorical images have the atmosphere of an alternative world, some of which may be down to them featuring many women but no men. Loy sees that as part of a vision for strengthening the role of women in society.  Her pictures echo myths and fairy tales as they search for a new mode of living which feeds on traditional female knowledge and its associated mysteries. Her style has a renaissance vibe enhanced by her choice of  casein paint, a medium derived from milk which has been used for murals since Ancient Egypt, but which has become rare with the advent of acrylic. Yet Loy's scenarios feel modern as well as witty. Consider the jostle of surveillant faces in 'Tree Garden',  and how inner states are pictorialised in her portrait-styled paintings. 

                                 

    

Rosa Loy (1958 Zwichau, Germany) lives in Leipzig. She studied horticulture 1976-1985 at Humboldt University Berlin, and painting 1985-1993 at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. She has had solo exhibitions at  Space K, Seoul (2021, with Neo Rauch), and in 2020 at Museum Bensheim (Germany), Lyles & King, New York, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig and Galerie Noah, Augsburg (Germany). Previous shows have included at Museum Zwickau, Germany; Kunstverein Elsterpark E.V., Leipzig, Germany; VEAG Förderpreis für Kunst, Leipzig, Germany; and Kunstverein der Stadt, Backnang, Germany. In the United States her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; André Schlechriem, New York; and David Zwirner, New York.

Annie Morris  

               

Stack 7, Cadmium Red, 2017 - Foam core, pigment, steel, concrete, plaster, sand, 

196cm high with base

Woman with Moon, 2021 - Thread on cotton, 121 x 142 cm (without loops)

Annie Morris’s work courses with life. That’s obvious enough in the fertile spontaneity of her repertoire of natural forms and flower-headed figures in drawings, paintstick and – paradoxically, given the painstaking process involved - tapestries.  Can the same be said of her best-known stream of work, the ‘stacks’ of boulder-like forms balanced improbably on top of each other in cheerful colours? Yes, and yet they originate from a dark place: Morris began the series a dozen years ago when she and her husband suffered a stillbirth. Their component shape references the womb, and they were a way of asserting optimism at a difficult time - which proved pleasingly well founded as the couple are now parents. The stacks are essentially paintings: palettes in which the particularity of colour and texture and their interaction is her core concern, right down to sourcing two sizes of sand grains, as well as pigments and binders from around the world. 

Annie Morris (b. 1978 in London) studied at St. Martins College of Art and Design (2002-2003) going on to École des Beaux Arts in Paris under Giuseppe Penonne (1998-2002) before completing her studies at Slade School of Art (2002-2004). Morris’ works are held in various collections across the world and her recent solo exhibitions include at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK and Timothy Taylor, London (2021); Union Gallery, London and Timothy Taylor, New York, and Venice Biennale (2019); ProjectB Gallery, Milan (2018), Winston Wachter Fine Art, Seattle (2018) and Victoria Miro, London (2018).

Martine Poppe   

High up, 2022 -  oil on polyester restoration fabric and textiles, 200 x 120 cm

Overspill, 2022 -  oil on polyester restoration fabric and textiles, 200 x 120 cm 

Today,  2022 -  oil on polyester restoration fabric and textiles, 200 x 120 cm

Martine Poppe’s recent series is called ‘Cloud Museum’.  As she explains, ‘clouds represent one of the biggest unknown factors in climate change, because their behaviour is so hard to predict… Global warming will cause more water to evaporate, which could result in a constant cloud cover, dimming the world. At the same time, the increase of CO2 and changing temperature could make the cumulus clouds (the ones I paint) become heavier, drop, heat up and break apart. Because they’d be less substantial, temperatures would then jump, heating the clouds further, causing them to disappear completely.’ So clouds are ambiguous, both formally, hovering between representation and abstraction, and in climate models – and Poppe loves them enough to have an archive of 20,000 photographs she's taken to inspire her! They also suit her particular combination of restoration fabric as a ground, and her feathery, rhythmic brushstrokes. Poppe also uses leftovers from making the paintings to form sculptures.  

Martine Poppe (1988, Oslo) lives and works in London and Oslo. She trained 2007 - 2011 BA Hons in Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and 2011 - 2013 MFA in Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her solo and two person exhibitions include with Kristin Hjellegjerde, Berlin (2018 and 2020) and London (2016, 2019 and 2021) , COUNTY at Palm Beach, Florida (2021), Art Monte Carlo with  VI, VII (2019), Trafo Kunsthall, Asker, Norway (2015 and 2018), and Venet-Haus Galerie, Neu Ulm, Germany (2017).

Johanna Reich

Crawler, as installed at Priska-Pasquer, Cologne, 2020 

Dora Maar from the series RESURFACE (Part II), 2019 - Digital c-print  

Johanna Reich is a video and performance artist working at the interface between digital and analogue visual worlds, directing our attention to the effects on our everyday lives of how online and physical are merging. For Crawler a search bot is programmed to collect recurring phrases from Internet discussions of such hot topics as climate change, gender roles and democratic systems. Self-driving robots then project the phrases onto the gallery architecture and audience. Resurface II follows on from the project Resurface, for which Reich and her team have, since 2012, added information to Wikipedia entries of largely forgotten female artists who - thanks to ongoing digitisation - have gained an online presence. Resurface II is dedicated to more successful women artists who are still not adequately recognised: Reich made Polaroids of their portraits and scanned them during the development process to create an image of translucent presence.

Johanna Reich (1977, Minden, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. She studied in Münster, Hamburg, Barcelona and Cologne during 2000-07 and is a guest professor at the Academy of Arts, Munich. Her most recent solo shows have been at Anita Beckers Gallery, Frankfurt (2022),  Galerie Milin, Paris (2021), L`agence à Paris Gallery, France (2019), Priska Pasquer Gallery Cologne (2019) and Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany (2018). She has received the Nam June Paik Award, the Excellence Prize of the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Konrad-von-Soest Prize, Germany, and been awarded artist residencies in Romania, the USA, Luxembourg and Spain. 

Aurora Reinhard  

                      

Artist & Curator, 2017 (with David Elliot)

Venus #1, (self-portrait), 2013 - Inkjet-print on Vinyl, 205 x 155 cm, ed. 1/3

        

Aurora Reinhard works conceptually with photographs, sculptures and videos dealing with themes of gender and sexuality, moving between documentary and surreal approaches. Recurrent themes have included an almost systematic and frequently provocative critique of one-dimensional identities and stereotyped images of women. When working on her pieces she has made a habit of putting herself on the line, and of looking for answers both in front of the camera and behind it: here we see two from a set of nine immodestly-scaled interpretations of femininity tainted by the porn industry and pin-up picture. Prosthetic devices, including masks and super-sized breasts, cover her body like armour, so that it is not clear where flesh begins and ends. And, as the quintessentially female Venus, the artist-warrior-goddess lands somewhere between comedy and pathos. 

Helsinki and Berlin based Aurora Reinhard (1975, Helsinki) studied photography and media art 1995-2003 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. In 2020 she had a solo exhibition at Aine Art Museum in Tornio Finland and participated in the Iconic Works exhibition at the National Museum of Sweden and at the National Gallery of Finland. In 2019 she was nominated for the Ars Fennica prize which is one of the biggest art prizes in Scandinavia, in connection with the nomination she exhibited at Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki and Sven Harrys Art Museum in Stockholm. Past solo shows include at Muyun Art & Culture Foundation Bejing in 2019, Zetterberg Gallery Helsinki in 2018 & 2017, Kunstverein Ruhr, Essen in 2018, Salon Dahlman Berlin in 2018.

Saelia Aparicio Torinos 

Mother of Thousands, 2021 - Welded powder coated steel, found salvaged glass, hand-blown glass and neon with mother of thousands plant

Fridge, 2021 - CNC plywood, stain dye, osmo, glass, found objects, ceramic, milliput

A table-as-person reveals a live plant in a glass intestine. London-based Spanish artist Saelia Aparicio has previously used the garden as metaphor for the body, where boundaries between genders, architecture, furniture, animals, and plant life have folded, so this might be seen as a person-plant. ‘I don’t see the body as a source of horror’, says Aparicio, ‘but we’re living in a world that’s increasingly superficial and very much related to the surface of the body. Things like fermentation and digestion are seen as gross and scary, but we all have this whole unknown world inside us that we don’t know and understand - I find that distance fascinating.’ Kalanchoe Daigremontiana (Mother of Thousands) is a Madagascan plant known for growing rapidly anywhere it lands – making it a ‘top ten’ invasive species.  So this is not necessarily a benign alteration of what it is to be human, more about how we classify other living beings according to our interest, and how that language revert back to us. Likewise the body as fridge. What seems clear, though, is that we don’t have control over nature: we’re in a fictional world of hybridity and interdependence, where what is human or what is nature is blurred. Or is that world so fictional after all? 

Saelia Aparicio Torinos (born Valladolid, 1982) is a London-based Spanish artist who completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2015. In 2019, Aparicio won Generaciones 2019, one of the most prestigious awards for emerging artists in Europe, and was commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, London to make the film ‘Green Shoots’ for their General Ecology symposium. Her recent shows include 'Bio-speculations for an expanded cohabitation' with The Ryder in Basel, Switzerland (2021) and Ferine (in collaboration with Paloma Proudfoot) at TJ Boulting, London. She appears courtesy of Gallery FUMI, London and The Ryder Projects, Madrid.

Lee Won-Kyoung   

                   

Lee Won-Kyoung, like Rose Wylie, presents animal life on a scale which could be threatening yet makes for an enchantingly friendly presence. That's  born out of a further paradox, as she employs hard, cold metal wires using a warm, soft knitting technique - and then hangs the hollow creatures to fly through the space, whether or not the animal represented is aerial.  Her sculptures are, of course, artefacts, but the resulting cellular components are plant-like, emphasising the natural continuity between plant, animal and - through us as viewers - human realms. By overlapping these in one work, Lee Won Kyoung asks her audience how they can coexist, respect and live with different attributes in this infinitely diverse world.

Lee Won Kyoung (1975, Cheonan, Korea) studied painting at Hannam University in Daejeon from 1995 to 2001, and formative arts at Dankook University in Yongin from 2010 to 2015. She has held numerous solo exhibitions in Seoul and Daejeon from 2001 onwards, including Daejeon Museum of Art, Lee Ung-no Art Museum, and Gwangju Museum of Art. In 2016, she was selected as the Artist of the Year by ThinkArtKorea and had an individual exhibition. She took part  in  in 2018. Percent for Art, Permanent Public Art, Philadelphia International Airport Terminal F, Philadelphia, PAIn 2019, she participated in the 'Lee Ung-no Paris Residence Program' in Paris, France and won the 'Ha Jung-woong Young Artist Award' in Gwangju, Korea.

Urara Tsuchiya  

Sauna, 2020 - Glazed stoneware, 32 x 42 x 32 cm 

Go down on a tree, 2020 - Glazed stoneware, 33 x 26 x 28 cm 

Suitcase, 2019 - Glazed stoneware, 60 x 42 x 22 cm

Underwear (black & green), 2020 - Glazed stoneware, 20 x 37 x 5.5 cm

Urara Tsuchiya spent Frieze London 2019 in bed, treating Union Pacific's booth as a hotel room in which she was surrounded by such eccentric ceramics as underwear and bottles of booze as well as her well-known strand of sex acts and animals - or both -  not infrequently hidden within innocuous looking bowls. That's all typical of how she ignores the usual distinctions between public and private, in film and sculpture as well as ceramic, and challenges us to decide what our boundaries might be. Is panda coupling cute or embarrassing? How sensible is sex in a sauna?  Can trees feel pleasure? What sort of sense might it make to pack a ceramic bra in a ceramic suitcase in readiness for embarking on such adventures? 

Urara Tsuchiya (1979, Tokyo) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. She did an MFA at Glasgow School of Art and studied fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London. Previous solo exhibitions include presentations at Frieze, London (2019) and Liste, Basel (2018), and shows at Ada Project, Rome and Galleri Golsa, Oslo (2020), Glasgow International (2018 and 2020), Trade Gallery (2017) and Union Pacific, London (2016). 

Caroline Walker

Bathroom, Room 608, 2018 - oil on board, 45 x 36cm

Brazilian Blow Dry, 2019 - Oil on linen, two parts, 232 x 300 cm

Dishwasher Loading, After Dinner, March, 2020 - Oil on board, 45 x 36cm

Caroline Walker's sumptuous paintings focus on women within psychologically charged public spaces and as hidden labour: they are active subjects yet our view is complicated by a potentially voyeuristic gaze. The view is often through a window, a formal framing device which also suggests the woman’s containment. Walker works from photographs, originally setting up scenarios or photographing from the street, but she has recently turned towards her own day to day life. She has also focussed on her own mother in her house in Dunfermline, Scotland, saying: ‘I was making paintings of women at work, and my mum was at work too. Although women’s lives have changed a lot, they are still doing this hidden, domestic work. I had a moment where I thought: I’ve been looking everywhere else, but there’s something interesting right here.’

Caroline Walker (1982 Dunfermline, UK) currently lives and works in London, where she completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions have been at the Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham (UK); GRIMM,  New York  - all 2021 -  Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2020), GRIMM, Amsterdam (2019), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2018) and Space K, Gwacheon, Korea (2017). Group shows include at Victoria Miro Gallery, London and the Whitechapel Gallery, London and the British Art Show 9, currently touring the UK.

Rose Wylie  

'Snake', 2018, as installed at David Zwirner, London 

Asafo Flag, (homage, history notes), 2021 - Coloured pencil, biro and collage on paper 29.6 x 21.3 cm

Asafo Flag Painting, (homage, history notes), 2021 - Oil on canvas  182.5 x 155.5 cm 

Rose Wylie's lively visual lexicon draws from multiple sources to arrive at wittily observed meditations on the nature of visual representation. The Asofo Flag drawing and painting show how her eclectic combinations develop.  She says of her extraordinary ten panel snake  that, given the chance to fill a whole room with one painting, she thought 'a distinct and singular, long-running-form' would 'cover the ground, and at the same time hold itself together as a coherent and connected work... and the snake often has a strong geometric marking: (see my distanced bunches of 3 clear dots).  I didn’t want a robust or baroque snake, or a rococo fiddle-about….nor a Hollywood or pop  item, more something that might find itself on a flag or ancient manuscript, something recognisable but not realistic either... It referenced Chinese kites for me, so keep the colour light and stick an outline along it to make it show up from a distance as that would be its only complete image...  Anyway, for depth of meaning in an apparently simplified ‘look',  the snake is stacked with symbolic interpretation…including the nice contrasts of ‘healing', ‘perpetuation’, ‘ poison' and ’sin'... There are no props to distract... there is  only the restraint of the somewhat metaphysical, well-spaced lettering, which makes a  long-parallelism with the word 

S N A K E, mapping the image and  holding up the bottom. The snake floats on bare  canvas, long and friendly, and not oppressive'.

Rose Wylie (1934 Hythe, Kent, UK) studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Kent, and the Royal College of Art, London, from which she graduated in 1981. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1985 at the Trinity Arts Centre in Kent. She won the John Moores painting prize in 2014. Her recent solo shows include several round the world with the Choi-Lager  and David Zwirner galleries and solo presentations at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, England (2012); Tate Britain, London and Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg, Norway (2013); Serpentine Gallery, London (2017); Plymouth Arts Centre, England and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2018), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain (2018); and The Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida,  the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado and the Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul (2020) and Museum Langmatt in Baden, Switzerland (2021). In 2018, Wylie was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to art.