Germaine Kruip
dal 28/5/2009 al 8/8/2009
Segnalato da
28/5/2009
Germaine Kruip
Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf
Aesthetics as a Way of Survival. The solo exhibition presents new artworks especially created for the show. Upon entering the stage-like spaces - equipped with minimal means - Kruip makes the viewer the actual agent in her spatial interventions. She confronts the viewer with the question of the relationship between fiction and reality, authenticity and representation. Are we dealing with representations of reality or constructs, portrayals or inventions?
The solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Germaine Kruip (born 1970) will present new artworks especially created for the show. Upon entering the stage-like spaces—equipped with minimal means—Kruip makes the viewer the actual agent in her spatial interventions. She confronts the viewer with the question of the relationship between fiction and reality, authenticity and representation. Are we dealing with representations of reality or constructs, portrayals or inventions?
The subtitle Aesthetics as a Way of Survival is derived from the eponymous film that Kruip made earlier this year with Renske Janssen in North Eastern Australia and as such forms the thematic starting point of the exhibition. The film presents the male bowerbird building elaborately designed bowers—mock nests that are constructed according to purely aesthetic criteria and that are indeed reminiscent of artworks. In this way the birds also place fine, coloured touches using found materials. The bowers are supposed to attract the female bowerbird and form the centrepiece of a precisely choreographed courtship display. The male practices his patterns of movement around the bower in advance of the mating season—occasionally with the aid of another male bird, occasionally or so it would seem, for Kruip’s camera.
Her film about the bowerbird poses the question relating to the »artificial« and the »natural« in a surprisingly new way, encompassing the whole exhibition with this dichotomy. Guided by visual similarities Kruip establishes a number of connections in the exhibition between her different works. Gigantic slabs of marble with a striking grain reminiscent of ellipse-shaped bowers of the birds seem to explore the boundaries between nature and construct, between appearance and being, as indeed do Kruip’s three-dimensional mobiles that cast unexpected shadows on the wall.
Germaine Kruip designed the insert for the 01/09 edition of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen’s magazine Béton Brut.
The exhibition is co-curated by Renske Janssen and will be accompanied by a catalogue publication.
Press preview: may 29th, 2009
Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen
Grabbeplatz 4 - Dusseldorf