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23/11/2006

Gitte Schaefer

Frac Bourgogne, Dijon

Curatated by Eva Gonzalez-Sancho

Gitte Schafer (born in 1972 in Stuttgart) is showing a major selection of works at the FRAC Bourgogne (Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection). These works hail from different collections, and she has elected to associate them with site specific works. Since the year 2000 she has been involved in a close observation of the effect of time on images and objects produced, disseminated, forgotten, and reappearing, coming up with paintings and sculptures which seem at once ageless and amazingly close. Her praxis is rooted in the arena of the unusual and the strange, creating in the space of the exhibition venue a place that wavers between the cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammer, and the fantastic landscape. Multiple games of association count for a lot in the artist's pleasure, as well as the visitor's.

Gitte Schafer's work is based on principles which might be linked, in an initial phase, with the freedom of childhood, the freedom of playing games, intuition and wonder. Well removed from any kind of naivety, however, the artist juggles with many different art references and the familiarity of elements, drawing us into a very strange and strangely off-kilter world.

Gitte Schafer collects images and objects, as she reads magazines of yesterday and today, goes to bric-a'-brac markets and garage sales, and comes upon finds offered by chance. She appropriates these accumulations in differing ways. In some cases, she reproduces details of images and found pictures which she paints with acrylic, draws in ink, or with crayons or even ballpoint pens. For others, she makes collages on different surfaces. She also produces sculptures for which she assembles objects based on their shape, matter and colour. Their vertical structures rise to various heights, strange totem poles, and prayer mats surmounted by a globe, a yacht, a pair of scales, and other such things. In the way in which the West has managed to look at certain objects from African, Asian and Oceanian cultures as pure aesthetic gestures, even going so far as to forget their user value, Gitte Schafer leaves in mid-air the interpretation of these strange mats, not without giving rise to a certain confusion. Is the showy presentation of a meaningful object involved here? Missing, if so, would be the origin as much as the recipient, in order to grasp the scope. These sculptures are called Angelo, Jean, Vermeer. Perhaps, as these titles suggest, the choice of objects is linked with a person, either famous or anonymous. The artist specifies thus: "Some are names from old myths and other languages, and convey, like other motifs, very common cliche's, encompassing a wide range of possible readings." So culture is at the hub of her interests-- "cultures", plural, would actually be more exact, such is the criss-crossing of references, to a point where they become obsolescent. Art or craft, manual works or scholarly practices, figurative or abstract representations, "original" images or images seen many times, everything is mixed together pell-mell. Many artists went to work on imagery in the 20th century, either to grasp the sociological aspect or out of iconoclasm, to make emblems and pastiches of them. This is not what Gitte Schafer proposes, for she is perhaps seeking the place where these diverse practices can achieve resonance with one another.

A large part of Gitte Schafer's work lies in the way she conceives her exhibitions. The works in two or three dimensions are put together in eclectic installations, mixing pictures and objects, releasing a certain obsolescence. In fact the objects and motifs seem to have come from another age, and are hard to pin dates to, for each one, taken separately, can easily come from any old kind of present-day bazaar or tourist shop. Their familiar presence immediately links art with life, with furniture, and with apartments in which are accumulated objects of all shapes and sizes over the years, which also lends them a certain affective dimension. The objects are included in a blurred past and a vague nostalgia might be found floating around the works. Yet the artist is careful never to let the onlooker go where he or she might slip to, either out of comfort or convention, and she makes sure she diverts him or her towards less certain paths. The art of playing with common places and upping their scope.

The spaces are regularly punctuated with objects which blur the tracks still more. In the manner of Surrealism, a hand emerges from the wall (exhibition Magpies' Booty, New York, 2005), a plastic doe is placed on the floor (exhibition The Raven is Dead, Copenhagen, 2005), and a hexagon made of mirrors is surmounted by a deer's hoof (Ernest., 2006). Through their broken scale and their heterogeneous nature, these objects lose the eye a tad more. The relations between the works--chaotic structures at first--gradually reveal their canny arrangement. This works with the link to the place's space with a great deal of complexity, under the very classical appearances of a simple type of hanging. The interplays of vanishing lines and points, the perspectives and illusions, the axes in two and three dimensions, all compose a real polyphony. "In music, disharmonic aspects can become harmonic again, by following a certain order", stresses Gitte Schafer, who often re sorts to musical metaphor in order to evoke the way her work is proceeding.

In the plethora of avenues opened up by Gitte Schafer's work, we might also emphasize the way she engineers a meeting between the art of the show and the more prosaic art of interior decoration. Decorative dimensions are very present in 20th century art, and Gitte Schafer plays with them through, for example, the use of many motifs, the evocation of the item of furniture, and the inclusion of works in an almost landscaped environment. So, far from any kind of demonstration, Gitte Schafer calls upon ornament, defining its outlines wherever it touches on numerous art practices or not. She comes up with exhibitions that are full of generosity, seeing the work as a place of linkage, underscoring its cultural dimensions as much as its emotional ones, commonly shared.

Text: Claire Legrand, manager of the visitors' department
Translated by Simon Pleassance

This exhibition was produced with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC: Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Burgundy Regional Council, the Cote d'Or General Council, and the Rhineland-Palatinate Centre (Dijon).

We should like to thank the following for the loan of works: Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin (DE), Kirkhoff - Contemporary Art, Copenhague (DK), Galerie S.AL.E.S., Rome (IT), Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris (FR), collection Paul Maenz, Berlin (DE), collection Gerd de Vries, Berlin (DE).
The Frac Burgundy is member of PLATFORM.

Opening: Friday 24 Nov., 6 pm

free guided visit Saturday 16 December 2006 at 3 pm

Frac Bourgogne
49 rue de Longvic F - Dijon
Open from Monday to Saturday from 2-6 pm, except on public holidays

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