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16/6/2008

Susan Turcot and Douglas Kolk

Arndt & Partner Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin

Arndt & Partner is happy to announce its second solo show of works by the Canadian artist Susan Turcot, entitled bitumen, blood and the carbon climb, consisting of drawings, sculptures, and an animated film.

Drawing has undergone an extraordinary development as an artistic means of expression. Today more than ever, drawings are descriptions of reality. They tell stories, record experience, help to explore perception, and recreate memory – they are maps of objects, movement, of space and ideas.

Susan Turcot’s drawings engage with today’s political, social, economic, and ecologic realities, such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the exploitation of boreal forests in Canada, the conditions and effects of the world of labour, the life situation of indigenous people in northern Brazil, or the war in Iraq. Her works are however not just representations of the given, in the sense of a factual representation of events and places, but always also reflect the artist’s reactions and thoughts about these realities; thus they are a kind of intuitive translation of her research and her experiences. There is no narrative structure in the serial works, but rather a simultaneity of events that seem frozen, like in snapshots. Similar to the process of a diary notation, for Turcot drawing is a way of recording observations and states, a commentary on the conditions of human life in the modern world. Her drawings are the carriers of multi-layered visual, factual, psychological, and philosophical information. At the same time, the works also reflect the process of drawing itself. Circular shadows above the eyes of portrayed people do not just imply their protection, but rather seem to pose fundamental questions about the process of seeing and perception, while the simultaneity of figurative details and abstract dissolution (such as in Divided Subjects) or drawing over certain areas with expressive lines or black surfaces, explore the possibilities of the act of drawing: reflection and directness, research method and psychic notation, controlled lines and impulsive energy. In a continuous process, the content is filtered through the exterior form – and vice versa.

All these aspects are also evident in the latest series, Faultline (2007). Ruins of buildings from classical antiquity rise from a formerly intact forest, revealing a strange procession inside. Threatening clouds tower over a terraced mountainscape, which in the front suddenly break off into an Orcus. People surround a machine, while in the background a threatening blackness rises. Fantastical buildings in torn, craggy landscapes, run through by holes and canyons. The dominant mood in these elegiac drawings is threatening, indeed dark – an almost apocalyptical vision of a world undergoing drastic changes.

This series does not seem to be just about the representation of reality, but also the representation of mental landscapes. Both the drawings and their title are full of references to the relationship between man and nature. The English word ‘fault’ does not just mean lack or defect, but also guilt (in the sense of responsibility), and has also a geological meaning. Thus these drawings also show the possible consequences of the mistakes that we make ecologically, and simultaneously pose the question of our responsibility in our dealings with the world. ‘The drawn line can be receptive for an inner knowledge that otherwise would remain out of reach. In the process of drawing, the form invents itself instead of being preconceived’, Susan Turcot says. Thus her understanding of drawing stands in the art historical tradition of the ideal of the self-validating line (disegno interno) as the most apt possibility of intellectual articulation and artistic activity.

Barbara Heinrich

Born in 1966 in Montreal, Susan Turcot studied art and philosophy at Middlesex University in London. She lives and works in London, Québec, and Berlin. She has been regularly represented at group exhibitions and solo shows with Arndt & Partner since 1995. Additional solo shows took place at Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid (2000), Galerie Ursula Walbröl, Düsseldorf, and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (both 2007), and most recently the show Drawings + Digital Animations at Illingworth Kerr Gallery | ACAD, Calagary. In 2006, she participated in the 27th São Paulo Biennale and in 2007 in the 5th Montréal Biennale. Currently her work is shown in the group exhibition Ad Absurdum – Energien des Absurden von der Klassischen Moderne zur Gegenwart, MARTa Herford – Museum für zeitgenössiche Kunst und Design, Herford (until 27 July 2008).

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Douglas Kolk
Karen Parkers World
17 June – 17 July 2008

Arndt & Partner is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Douglas Kolk – Karen Parkers World – presenting collages, drawings, a wall drawing created especially for the gallery space and for the first time sculptures from the American artist.

Douglas Kolk’s work revolves around questions of identity, initially in small format drawings and then later in large format works and collages. Figures appear to be restlessly searching for a sense of self. In his drawings, influenced by Pop Art and the current torrent of media images, he emphatically succeeds in expressing human vulnerability, human depth and extreme psychological states. In doing so, in his small and medium formats he works to create a striking, yet restrained visual language through a focused reduction of the forms, lines and colours in which – similar to Raymond Pettibon - sentences, like fragments of thoughts, are integrated so they can be perpetuated by the viewer, enabling them to steer the represented situation in another direction.
In the new large format Collages however, Kolk’s articulation has become more expressive.

“The restrained, factual outline drawings have given way to brushstrokes with a vibrant life of their own. Kolk’s expressive brushwork in these pieces is accompanied by pictures from magazines and silhouettes of objects, shadows of themselves. These have not been delineated by the artist’s pencil, however; the objects were physically laid out on the paper and then Kolk sprayed a fine mist of paint over them, so that on their removal a white area retaining their outline was left behind. The mingling of drawing and painting as a means of expression complements the broad range of individual pictures. The coloration, with its gradations of intensity, is full of contrast; the artist uses such an abundant spectrum of color – matching the plethora of motifs – that it threatens to overwhelm the viewer. This is Kolk’s way of transplanting in the viewer the moods and states of mind of his figures, all of them seemingly lost in a world that no longer offers anything to cling to, indeed almost no recognizable point of reference of any kind. Themes from earlier works have acquired a sharper dramatic profile, and appear in fragmented form. Quotations from popular culture and from the fashion and music scenes are the thematic link for the shallow icons of desire that are the sole remaining ideals it seems we have to aspire to. A similar function can be identified in the blaring advertising slogans, with their headline urgency that allows not an instant for reflection and thus denies the images any permanence, reducing them to something briefly glimpsed in the swirling torrent of modern image production. Kolk’s collages mimic this rapid tempo – and at the same time freeze it for the observer.

The collage principle enables him to artistically present the chaos of modern life as a principle in its own right. Sometimes, from the maelstrom of motifs, a single over-riding figuration emerges in an attempt to bind together the work as a whole: It might be a large face, a dominant word or phrase, or the purposive division of the large-format works into zones by demarcation lines painted or even sprayed into place. Individual motifs may gain or lose prominence as a result. The observer’s eye is caught and held by individual images like the various incorporated magazine cuttings – women wearing sunglasses, well-known models, erotically parted lips – or dwells on the plain and simple photograph of a crow. The large formats enable viewers to immerse themselves in these pictures, experiencing them physically, but also to step back and contemplate them in a distanced way. Momentarily, the unending torrent of images is arrested. While we contemplate these works we are no longer lost, like an adolescent, in the unending flow, but instead regain the ability to choose whether to plunge more deeply into the intensity of specific elements, or to allow ourselves to be carried away by the juxtapositioning and merging of the images.” (Holger Birkholz)

Born in 1963 in Newark, New Jersey. He lives and works in Boston. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions including It isn’t me mother, presented at Arndt & Partner Berlin during its founding year in 1994; at the Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel (1997); and at Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2007). Group exhibitions he has taken part in include Gesichter einer Sammlung at the Kunsthalle Mannheim and USA TODAY at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (both 2006); as well as Sweet Bird of Youth, curated by Hedi Slimane at Arndt & Partner Berlin (2007). Forthcoming in October 2008 is a solo show at Gallery Pilar Parra & Romero in Madrid, Spain.

Arndt & Partner
Zimmerstrasse 90-91- Berlin

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