SASKIA TE NICKLINPicture Wild Portrait Me
Exhibition
Introduction
Victoria Dejaco, Grazer Kunzverein, freelance curator
Victoria Dejaco, Grazer Kunzverein, freelance curator
LOGIN
Grünangergasse 1
1010 Vienna
8 Apr – 16 May 2015
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
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Saskia Te Nicklin interprets her historical, art historical, political and literary research through a very individual artistic language. It is not however purely illustrative but always also a transition and transformation towards the mystic, symbolic and emotive. Her technical mastery in sculpture and painting is evident, in part through her efforts to mask it in the attempt to arrive at an intuitive process, to remain forever the dilettante (in the sense of the Italian dilettare: to enjoy, delight in.) In 2013, Saskia Te Nicklin created a series of ceramic gramophone records. In myth, archaeological ceramic pots in the Mojave Desert were produced by women as they sang, and it is said that their voices can be heard if the pots are played in the right way. These works emerged out of the artist’s investigation into archaeoacoustics, dedicated to the sound of sites as an indication to transpired events. Her installation “In His Study” (2012) transforms a number of elements from Albrecht Dürer’s “Saint Jerome in His Study” into abstract, rudimentary forms. The lion is reduced not to his mane as would be typical, but to his parallel, outstretched paws, which become geometric wedges. The objects are arranged on wobbly-looking shelves, in such a way that it is unclear which are the supports and which the supported. The shelves are reminiscent of a test rig, or simply a library, as in Dürer’s original. In her installation for LOGIN, Nicklin presents three works that arose from her engagement with Oscar Wild’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891). The book was copied page for page from the original by litho press, with the text replaced, similar to Marcel Broodthaers’ “Coup de Dés”, by bars of colour. This is less a sculptural illustration so much as an underscoring of the content. The coloured bars are placed over the text wherever colours are described. “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn,” begins the opening passage. Like a Morse code, the colours are transferred to a 4-meter-wide canvas, presented not on the wall but standing upright like a personification of colour-force. Behind glass, echoing the whole LOGIN situation. Isolation, partitioning, protection, preservation? That the glass tube comes from the chemicals industry is no coincidence. The book is lying on a transit blanket. The kind used to transport metal, whereas books are usually packaged in glassine paper. This connects the book with the aluminium plates with one simple gesture. “Unspecified textile composition” reads the label on the blanket. A woven sea of indeterminate colours makes up the texture of the fabric and reverberates the colours of the book. The four aluminium plates, with screws positioned to mimic eyes, compose the backdrop of the scene. Aluminium rebounds light but does not mirror. The reflections remain opaque. “The face one desires is always opaque. Opaque literally means shadowed. This negativity of the shadow is fundamental to desire [...] where there is shadow, there is also sparkle.” [1] In an age of increasing transparency and media exposure, with respective lack of mediation and filtering, Nicklin’s work maintains the materiality and roughness necessary to provoke, resist and come across as real enough to fracture the slick perfection of today’s imagery. [1] Byung Chul Han, Im Schwarm, Berlin 2013, p. 38.
ASKIA TE NICKLIN, born 1979 in Copenhagen, lives and works in Vienna since 2011 / Selected Exhibitions: 2015 Kitsch Rites, Minuit Vernissage, Copenhagen (solo); A likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, Semper Depot Vienna; 2014 Dull Case of The Call Unanswered, Galerie Diana Lambert, Vienna (solo); Majestic Bather, 68m2, Copenhagen; RIGID/FRIGID, Sammlung Lenikus, Vienna; 2013 Cloud Hosting, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; 2012 I don’t eat, I don’t sleep – I do nothing but think of You, Ve.Sch, Vienna (solo); 2011 Wiener Glut, KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), Düsseldorf
The exhibition takes place on the occasion of Destination Wien 2015 EXTENDED.
Photo
- Markus Wörgötter
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