Artists included are Miroslaw Balka, Joseph Beuys, Ian Kiaer, Mark Manders, Helen Mirra, Valeska Soares
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present Material as Metaphor,
a curated group show featuring Miroslaw Balka, Joseph Beuys, Ian Kiaer,
Mark Manders, Helen Mirra and Valeska Soares. The selected works
represent a group of artists whose practice incorporates a carefully
considered use of materials that are imbued with particular symbolic or
metaphorical significance. Helen Mirra's sculpture and installations
evoking the natural world can be considered a poetic counterpoint to
Ian Kiaer's assemblages, in which found materials stand in for man-made
constructions. Likewise, in the work of Miroslaw Balka, sculptural
materials symbolically refer to the physical, while the substance of
Mark Manders' work signifies the psychological. Valeska Soares uses a
diverse array of materials such as steel, wax, glass, mirror, flowers
and perfume to symbolise such concepts as identity, desire, and the
corporeal. In this context, Joseph Beuys is positioned as an historical
figure of reference by his investment of specific materials with
metaphysical and transcendental properties.
The works by Joseph Beuys incorporate two materials the artist found
immensely powerful: fat and felt. The Beuysian legend of his wartime
rescue by Tartars from a downed Luftwaffe airplane has served as a
foundation for his fascination with these substances. To Beuys, fat
signified chaos and the potential for spiritual transcendence through
its ability to exist in nature as two extremes: a viscous liquid and
defined solid. Felt, a wool fabric often combined with various other
fibers through pressure, heat or chemical processes, is significant in
its potential to absorb almost anything with which it comes into
contact. Its murky gray color also played an important role, as Beuys
hoped a minimal, uncolored surface would evoke a colorful, internal
retinal after-image. The strong poetics of Beuys's practice
conceptually anchor Material as Metaphor, and act as a thread linking
the other works in the exhibition.
Ian Kiaer groups architectural models, found objects and
two-dimensional works to create intricate compositions infused with
narrative. Kiaer's work is layered with references to selected figures
and concepts from the history of architecture and social philosophy.
His installation in the main gallery is part of an ongoing project
looking at the work of Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, who pioneered
the use of modular units for high density living in the 1960s.
Influenced by his childhood activity of keeping bees and by D'arcy
Thompson's book, On Growth and Form, which looked to draw architectural
and structural solutions from examples found in nature, Safdie proposed
solutions for high density living based on the honeycomb. This
particular work, Moshe Safdie Project / (yellow), also takes into
account a scene in Victor Erice's 1973 film, The Spirit of the Beehive,
in which a writer who keeps a glass beehive in his home, stays up at
night writing about the workings of the insect, inspiring both wonder
and fear. These two references align the relationships between thought,
building and dwelling.
In his work Miroslaw Balka transforms modest substances into symbols of
human existence. Drawing on his childhood in Poland and Catholic
upbringing, he creates subtle yet conceptually loaded works that evoke
memories and experiences. Often, he creates works on a human scale that
refer to the corporeal, as in 2 x (60 x 62 x 200), Ø 6 x 0,1 x 500 : a
pair of felt columns whose measurements correlate to the artist’s own
body. In Balka's vocabulary the dense cylindrical forms are metaphors
for a retreat from the outside world, the felt offering comfort and
warmth. Eye-like slits in the fabric though allow a means of observing
the world from within. Likewise 37 x 33 x 12 (One Armpit) and Ø 14 x 16
(One Lamp) take Balka’s own physicality as the basis for the work. The
artist's height determines the placement of the shelf-like 37 x 33 x 12
(One Armpit) on the wall. Ø 14 x 16 (One Lamp), made of steel, ceramic
and salt, is placed on the floor. The works recall a domestic
environment (a shelf, a lamp), while at the same time the salt on the
Lamp (referencing sweat and tears) and the height of the shelf always
allude to the body.
Helen Mirra often works with cloth and text producing objects that,
through repetition and a reductive vocabulary, reference the formal
strategies of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Exploring the relationship
between human existence and nature, Mirra's captivating and poetically
driven works often convey a sense of place. Engaged in a process of
'mapping', Mirra captures the atmosphere of a location in exquisitely
simple terms. The three Dock sideview works shown here refer to the
conception the harbour as a site. The lengths of linen fabric
simultaneously allude to the physical presence of docks, yet also the
to the horizon and our perception of the 'edge' of the natural world.
English and German text fragments on the fabric hint at markers –
Dividing line, Dock as arm – but are more triggers and suggestions of
place than definitive descriptions. Sky cross-section is an image of a
slice of a sky at the harbor; which appears as an abstraction in its
partiality, but is determined by the cranes and other machinery which
move containers from ship to shore.
Mark Manders carefully assembles apparently unrelated images, objects,
and texts into elaborate accumulative sculptures that further his
personal mythology. Considering his practice an ever-growing project in
self-portraiture, Manders arranges and codifies material elements
according to his individual understanding of the relationships of the
objects to one another. The sculptures therefore present an esoteric
narrative, somehow simultaneously recognizable and unfamiliar. Reduced
Summer Garden Night Scene (Reduced to 88%), shown in the main gallery,
brings together a walkman, cups, and loudspeakers in a garden, all
reproduced in porcelain and reduced to 88% of their original size. The
dark scene has a somber quality, further removed from reality by its
stillness and silence (even the imagined sound from the speaker is
reduced), evoking, according to the artist, 'a soundless night
photograph.'
Valeska Soares's installation Sem Titulo (Preserva), consists of
freestanding bundles of roses wrapped in white cotton. Over the course
of the exhibition, the fragrant roses will dry and wither. Standing in
for the body, the roses also signify desire and decay. Soares has long
been interested in the spatial and emotional aspects of the garden, and
the deliberately placed forms in the entrance gallery prompt a
redefined negotiation of the gallery space while the sensorial effects
play on personal memory and experience.