Silke Otto-Knapp
dal 29/9/2011 al 14/1/2012
Segnalato da
29/9/2011
Silke Otto-Knapp
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA, Berkeley
A light in the moon. The London-based, German artist uses the transparency of watercolor to describe movement, to activate spatial environments with kinetic materials, and to open up painting to the possibilities of performance. Using photographic documentation of seminal dances as source material, the artist gradually unfixes these images and mobilizing the canvas space.
The paintings of Silke Otto-Knapp require movement. With layered washes of similarly hued watercolors, the canvases of this London-based German artist seem at first monochromatic, but slight changes in light or a viewer’s position reveal clusters of dancers, a single body pressed up against the edges of the picture plane, or a moonlit landscape. Moving in front of the paintings, we see their potential motion - iconic performances by George Balanchine, Yvonne Rainer, Bronislava Nijinska lie latent within, or a landscape appears: a painted backdrop, awaiting stage directions. Reinterpreting the modernist logic of Ad Reinhardt and Merce Cunningham, Otto-Knapp draws from the vocabulary of abstraction to renew our engagement in the act of seeing.
Otto-Knapp’s recent work conflates the mediums of painting and performance by creating a third site: a theatrical/pictorial stage. Her application of silver pigment serves to echo the shiny seduction of Pop materiality and to veil, or curtain, the represented image. Appropriating famous photographs from contemporary choreography, she stages them within, and behind, this ethereal pigment. This makes for a surprisingly kinesthetic spectacle: figures float tenuously between visibility and invisibility, refusing to be ‘fixed’ onto the canvas, and we, as spectators, perform our own extemporal choreography out of the friction of standing before and within staged space. This work has inspired a L@TE event with rare videos and live dance performances that will celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Matrix 239 / Silke Otto-Knapp: A light in the moon, two films and two dances reconsider formal paradigms found in her paintings. The program commences with footage of Parades and Changes by Anna Halprin, performed at the opening of the Berkeley Art Museum on November 6, 1970, and Dance Fractions for the West Coast, a pedagogical dance that includes an extremely rare 1969 recording of Yvonne Rainer performing Trio A. Following this, and a Q & A with Otto-Knapp, are live performances of Trio A in three variations and new work by the artist/choreographer Flora Wiegmann.
Support
Exhibition conceived by Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas. The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.
Image: Stage, 2009; watercolor and gouache on canvas; 55 x 67 in.; courtesy of The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas
Media Contact: Peter Cavagnaro, (510) 642-0365 pcavagnaro@berkeley.edu
Opening / L@TE: MATRIX Live
Friday, September 30 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm
University of California,
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA)
2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; open till 9 p.m. on L@TE Fridays
Closed Monday and Tuesday
General admission is $10; admission for seniors, disabled persons, non–UC Berkeley students, and young adults (13–17) is $7; admission for BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty, and children under 12 is free.
Admission is free on the first Thursday of each month.