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19/1/2006

Eva-Maria Wilde, Nikos Navridis

Magnus Muller, Berlin

Two Exhibitions

In her third show in gallery magnus muller, Eva-Maria Wilde presents works from the years 2005 and 2006, created especially for this purpose.

After having constructed mainly spatial and colourful installations, Eva-Maria Wilde is now more engaged in paintings. Beside two large-sized paintings, 30 small paintings made of acrylic, lacquer and gouache on MDF or canvas in the colour spectrum of black, white and grey will be shown at Magnus muller.

Wilde's city views focus on the urban space of mega cities, their facades, structures and constructions. During her trips through Asia¹s boom towns, the artist has produced an extensive picture archive which she uses as inspiration and sample. The main motive in her paintings is the external view of accommodation and office towers and their reflection in the glass facades. Thus the architectural fragments get the structure of water surfaces in which light reflections are broken. Due to the selected details an intense abstraction of a whole architectural structure is generated ­ an impression which is intensified by the emphasis on the surface. Often the image is dissolved into a raster-like pattern of a horizontal and vertical grid. The motives are as fragmentary as the perception of human beings in metropolis which also can handle only a small part of visual impressions.

Eva-Maria Wilde's paintings focus formally on the reproduction of the lucent surface, the external view of a house. They show an anonymous, faceless portrait of placeless accommodation and office towers. Nevertheless, Wilde has developed her own imagery language in which the commutability of modern architecture gets their own aesthetics. The interior of a building, the life, is perceptible through the observation of the facade, even if it is not shown in visual terms, and the invisible is experienced through the visible.

Nikos Navridis is one of the most well known contemporary Greek artists. magnus muller presents film stills from the video installation The Question of the Age of the Void (1996/2005) and the video projection Breath (2005), which has already been shown at the 51st Venice Biennial.

Navridis' video installations broach the issue of the element air, especially respiratory air, referring to the human body. Respiration is an essential part of existence: by inhalation and exhalation the rhythm of life is characterised and human life is preserved. Nikos Navridis studies the materialisation and visualisation of the invisible element air through the human being. His artistic means are similarly light and ephemeral as the air itself - and similarly vulnerable as the human body: gum serves as a substitute for skin and balloons become containers in which extension and concentration of air are visible and perceptible.

In the video installation The Question of the Age of the Void Navridis shows the dense of the empty room. Two twin sisters blow up a balloon by using mouth pieces at each of the ends. The size of the balloon gets larger and larger until the video screen is almost filled and the women are placed out of the visible part of the image. The size of the balloon gradually diminuishes, the women¹s faces appear again on the right and left side and press to the centre, as if their mouths wanted to touch themselves in the centre and through the gum. The inhalation and exhalation process characterise the blowing up in common of the balloon - his creation ­ so that the whole process becomes an act of communication.

Nikos Navridis is interested in both ancient and contemporary theatre. In the video projection Breath (2005), which has already been shown at the 51st Venice Biennial, he refers to Samuel Beckett¹s homonymous theatre piece from 1969. Beckett¹s one minute piece shows a stage loaded with rubbish without protagonists. It starts with a slight sobbing from afar which becomes the sound of the inhalation and ends again with a sobbing in the distance.

In Beckett's piece one can find all the essential elements which are important to Navridis: the inhalation as a metaphor of the birth and the exhalation as a metaphor of death. In Breath Navridis focuses on the image of the rubbish by projecting pictures of rubbish on the gallery wall. The viewer moves directly through this picturesque projection which underlies a permanent repetition. In Breath Navridis talks about the fugitiveness of life and the human tragedy, but he does this with easiness and a lot of optimism. Breath thus becomes the expression of the pole of tension of human existence.

Opening: January 20

Magnus Muller

Weydingerstr. 10/12 - Berlin
Hours: tue-sat 12-6pm

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