March 14 - May 10, 2019
Photos by Natalia Trejbalova
The first solo show in Italy by Marianne Vierø.
She focuses on processes of translation taking elements from different fields and techniques to make them cohabit and interact in new and never seen before formal results and experiments. Her praxis undermines the possibility of defining, in a certain, definitive and indisputable way the nature of her work, which in turn, presents itself as a hybrid organism.
In the exhibition Figure Bold Marianne Vierø presents three groups of works: multiple exposure prints on light sensitive paper, lithography on archival pigment prints and ceramic strokes and doodles. The first is a continuation of a line of work that the artist started in 2015 (presented in 2017 in the solo exhibition “Dunk” at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam and at LISTE, Basel) resulting in nonsensical rebus in the form of prints. Made in the darkroom and build up from multiple colored exposures on light sensitive paper, these prints combine projected photoshop files of digitalized brushstrokes with traditional photogram techniques where objects are placed directly on the image surface. The prints are presented in custom-made wood frames with inlaid details on the side of the frame profile. The second group of works, under the title of “Documentation of Imagined Sculpture”, presents stone printed monochrome abstractions on black and white snapshots of interiors - inspired by the book “Devenir de Fontana” (1961), a monograph curated by Ezio Gribaudo and published by Fratelli Pozzo in 1960, in which one of Lucio Fontana’s sculpture is documented on a b/w-photo with its area overprinted with gold. Starting from this result in which the base of the work and the background are the elements to be seen while the sculpture is totally obscured and reduced to a flat surface, Marianne Vierø works backwards placing each litho-printed monochrome on a base depicted on a b/w snapshot so that the overall image reads like a representation of a sculpture captured against a sunny background. The third group of works represents the spatial counterpart of the two-dimensional works introduced above, including a selection of small ceramic sculptures that gives volume to the strokes and doodles that like the digitalized brushstrokes are characterized by predetermined details, in this case through marks left by the machine that extrude the clay. The translation process activated by Marianne Vierø, from sculpture to flat surfaces, from these to objects and then again to brushstrokes, creates a circular and never-ending movement of exchanges among the definition of categories themselves. By doing this, the artist reveals the contradictory nature inherent in her work, which seems to belong to a predefined nature but actually is a game of worlds and languages that reinvent itself over and over again.
Marianne Vierø
Marianne Vierø (Copenhagen, DK) has been resident artists at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam; Triangle Arts Association in NYC; Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Coat Concave” at die Raum, Berlin (2017); “Glyph” at 427, Riga (2015); “Great Transformantion” (2014) and “Dunk” (2017) at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, followed by the participation at LISTE Basel. She has participated in group shows at: Future Gallery, Berlin; De Vleeshal, Middelburg; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; e 1857, Oslo.