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31/5/2002

Mendieta&Morenzi

Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam

TWO EXHIBITIONS:

ANA MENDIETA
Photo works

Ana Mendieta (Havana 1948-New York 1985) is now an indisputable international reference in the art world, her person and her works remain largely unknown. In her active, but tragically short life Ana Mendieta built up an exceptional oeuvre. During a period of thirteen years (1972-1985) she produced super-8 films and video, performances, actions and site-specific installations, drawings, prints, objects and sculptures.

The Cuban Ana Mendieta left at a young age - because of the political situation - her country and her family for the United States. At the end of the sixties she studied at the University of Iowa, which has been a very decisive period in her life. Also during the seventies she stayed most of the time in Iowa and executed there many of her performances.

About her radical choice for new forms of art she said: "The turning point in art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I want the image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic." In her early period (1972-1978) she did a lot of experimental actions and performances in which she investigated social taboos and transgressions. She focused on the subject of sacrifice and crime around the body as woman. Since 1975 she made the so called "Silueta"; (silhouette) works, in which she imprints of her own body merged in the landscape. In these works Ana Mendieta achieved a unique synthesis which related her actions to the form (silhouette) of her body, to land art and to the typical esoterically symbols of religions and primitive rituals.

From this early period of Ana Mendieta Galerie Akinci shows photo works of performances: Cosmetic Facial Variations (1972) and Body Prints (1974) and a portfolio of 12 photos of the Silueta-works in Iowa (1976-1978). A traveling exhibition of the work of Ana Mendieta was shown during the years 1996 and 1997 in the following places: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, Miami Art Museum of Dade County, Miami and MOCA, Los Angeles (cataloque).

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PETRA MORENZI
Sculptures & aquarelles

In her work, Petra Morenzi challenges us to believe what we are seeing. Her sculptural and drawing work is based entirely around ‘standard’ human figures that are far from being ‘normal’, to be in their presence is to feel that you came in at a point of mid-adoption, as if the figures have been given the task of managing and contemplating the physical forms they find themselves in.

Morenzi purposefully gives her figures paradoxical forms or situations, for example the installations of white polyester sculptures. Life sized human figures are placed in irrational positions, hovering between feasibility and impossibility. Their stark, anonymous whiteness seems emptied of expression and will, yet they curiously maintain stances that should require definite determination, if not gravity defiance, to be able to hold. Polyester as a material takes its form from its container: and in the way they are installed, these figures are shaped and given meaning by their strange relationship to their surroundings. They therefore legitimately belong to the world though at the same time appearing to be at complete odds with it. Morenzi’s intention is that emotions be projected onto them rather than emanating from them, emotions evoked by the experience of being physically among the sculptures. Keeping their secrets in solitude and silence, they seem somewhere between life and death, their poses bordering on being perverse in their stillness, unflinching at their own oddity.

At the crux of Morenzi’s work is the overlapping of realities, simultaneous perceptions of a common source. She is fascinated by the proximity of different worlds within a larger world. Alongside sculpture installations, Morenzi is interested in the possibilities of collaborative performances. Her starting point is in recognizing common experiences, for example speaking, writing, and allowing different versions to run, diversifying alongside each other, co-existing in the same space. An example is when she invited people from different countries to tell stories in their mother tongue, speaking in mixed groups nearby each other. The voices could be heard overlapping, and to stand and listen in different spots would cumulate an individual experience of the piece. Here as in the polyester figures, the physical positions of the viewers/listeners in relation to the work is highlighted as a way of seeing, and each persons experience of the same performance is different.

In her current earthy brown aquarelles and bronze sculptures, the main themes of her work are maintained, but the stark outline of the earlier polyester figures has eased away. In addition to the expected components of a "standard" human figure, here Morenzi includes bulbous shapes which have become part of a body or head, like extensions or balanced burdens. The results are somehow both "figurative" and "abstract" at the same time. These figures are strange because they are not awquard, having found an ease within themselves. As seemingly impossible or unlikely as they may appear, they undeniably make a visual sense which is difficult to rationalize. They seem calm, natural, pragmatically carrying themselves, appearing like symbols or ancient hieroglyphics. These figures are softly cryptic, strangely logical, and convincing in their simplicity.
Ellyn Southern

Image: Petra Morenzi, Untiteld aquarel 112 x 82 cm 2002

GALERIE AKINCI
Lijnbaansgracht, 317 1017 WZ Amsterdam
tel +31(0)20 6380480 fax +31(0)20 6386485

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