Moving in: Press release

 

Location
Friends Apartment, Berlin, Germany

Dates
September 30 – October 31, 2023

 

We’re pleased to present Moving in, a cross generational group exhibition with Karla Black, Zoë Carlon, Tatjana Danneberg, Karlo Kacharava, Nika Kutateladze, Paloma Varga Weisz, and Ian Waelder, taking place inside of a private apartment in Berlin.

Boxing, unboxing, packing, unpacking, relocating, rearranging, hanging, standing, leaning, sitting. How we move in and out of spaces and specifically one’s own domestic space, allows a story to unfold. While all seven artists’ works address autobiographical narratives, portraying human figures and everyday objects, the exhibition focuses on the intersection of these references.

In her artistic practice, the Scottish sculptor Karla Black prioritises material experiences first, and aims to evoke a physical response in the viewer. Black wishes to keep the materials raw, and thus the potential of the creative moment within them alive. In the door sculpture Family Land, we see how her work questions boundaries between interiority and exteriority, becoming conflicted in their own way.

Painter Zoë Carlon’s three intimate works in the exhibition offer us painterly responses to snapshots that the artist accrues on her mobile phone over time, which are then printed and archived. Like a visual diary, Carlon provides the viewer with cropped and momentary scenes. Preferring to paint on aluminium boards, the polished sheen unlocks a translucence where we experience a blurred and uncertain state, somewhere between the inside and outside.

Tatjana Danneberg’s works balance on the verge of photography and painting, with their subject matter being domestic objects, items, friends and family caught in intimate everyday scenes. She extends these temporary glances captured first by photographic means, then printed on specific films that are transferred onto canvas using gesso. Through manipulation and deconstruction, Danneberg explores the possibilities of painting with photography and what can unfold thereafter – brushstrokes break up the photographic image, gesturally turning it into an expressive painting.

Generations apart, Georgian artists Karlo Kacharava and Nika Kutateladze are nevertheless thematically closely entwined. Artist and writer Kacharava was exceptionally prolific during his short lifetime. A polymathic figure living in Tbilisi of the late 1980s and early ’90s, he produced paintings, essays, poetry, and art criticism, however never widely exhibited until after his untimely death in 1994. Evoking states between dreaming and consciousness, we see interior depictions of solitary figures lying on a bed, or in domestic spaces. His works allow us to engage with the human in a state of isolation and a kind of dreamscape, where allegory plays a significant role.
In Nika Kutateladze’s three serial works, we see a cinematic tableau of a story set in a mountainous region, centred in a ravine. Working in either immersive installations or painterly series, Kutateladze’s paintings are constructed with oil on grounded wood, where he frequently refers to compositional schemes of Georgian medieval iconography. Allegorical subject matter is at the forefront of his practice that conjures a filmic quality both haunting and evocative.

Continuing themes of allegory that imbue the domestic experience, and based on her personal life, the four works on paper by German sculptor and painter Paloma Varga Weisz depict at once tender and unsettling portraits of herself, her family and friends. Blurred by the presence of ever-changing psychological states, Varga Weisz shares a moving, emotional intimacy within her subjects.

In relation to his own biography, Ian Waelder explores intimate memories and traces within his work. Personal stories, objects and relics serve as a starting point that through a process of translation, he develops into scenes that sit somewhere between fiction and reality. In Handle with care (Les Quatre Cents Coups) Waelder constructs a multi-layered composition of abstracted gestures alongside stains, where a ghost-like image seemingly appears through the raw linen canvas.

The seven artists in Moving in present processes of moving in – and out, from the personal and autobiographical, to the allegorical and symbolic. In doing so, points of view become lucid, ever shifting, never stationary.