26/2/2011
Nancy de Holl & Esther Klaes
Bureau, New York
Opossums Persimmons. Sculpture, photography and painting. The show's title is borrowed from a photograph by Erica Baum from her late 90's series, 'Frick' photographed in the eponymous museum's picture library.
Bureau is pleased to present a two-person exhibition with the works of Nancy de Holl and Esther Kläs featuring sculpture, photography and painting. For both, representation is a fluid game of construction where objects and their surroundings share equal consideration and portrayal is actually untethered to factual representation.
A large form holds the center of the gallery. In Untitled (Come away with me), Kläs’s jagged volume in bright red aquaresin sits in contrast to its smooth rectilinear plinth. A low, interlocking pair of supports in concrete and wood seem to invite the viewer to share a seat beside the amorphous sculpture. Kläs’s work, however refuses the separation between object and support, as she is focused on the formal construction of the sculpture as a whole. As in many of her pieces, Kläs plays with the tension between domestic scale and the traditions of monumental sculpture.
Around this large piece hang a series of painted and photographic still lives by de Holl. Her photograph, Figures, Unknown from her series Peoples and Cultures shows what seem to be two small bronze figurines posed atop red blocks and set against a red backdrop. The surroundings seem stylized and out of time, giving the figurines an air of deep, cultural significance. Like many of her photographic still lives, the whole image is in fact constructed; the central bronze pieces are as much a work of invention as the framing devices. De Holl has taken a considerable step towards mending the figure and ground together in shifting her practice to painting. Patterns and cast shadows repeat between depicted object and background. De Holl invites an uncertainty between still life and portrait as inanimate objects like hats and books seem to take on personalities as their surrounding painted environments reiterate these signals of character.
Hi!, a wall work by Kläs, asserts the frame itself as sculpture. The piece exists between flatness and three-dimensionality. The frame here is also featured as subject matter as if to complete the deconstruction of the delineation between object and support. Inside, a softly sculpted rectangle in resin repeats the geometric frame surrounding it. Wooden back, top, and bottom faced by a panel of glass suggests a conventional vitrine, however without any sides the protective purpose is usurped. Kläs’s work is, afterall, that of a sculptor, and the work is conceived as a whole, greater than the sum of its parts.
The show’s title is borrowed from a photograph by Erica Baum from her late 90’s series, ‘Frick’ photographed in the eponymous museum’s picture library.
Image: Esther Klaes, Untitled (Come away with me), 2009
Opening: Sunday, February 27, 6 - 8 PM
Bureau
127 Henry Street, between Rutgers & Pike - NY
East Village / Lower East Side
Admission free