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31/1/2008

Angela Dwyer

Diehl Berlin, Berlin

Angela Dwyer's present series of paper works heralds a return to representational art after 20 years of nearly exclusively working in abstracts. During that time, she was almost obsessively fascinated by the qualities of squares or patterns, using thick spatula-applied paints to transform geometric precision into coarse, three-dimensional shapes. In parallel works, Angela Dwyer was creating script pictures on paper by adapting a process closely related to sampling in music. For these works, textual fragments from poems, novels, essays, Biblical quotes, newspapers or personal notes are dislocated from their original context and embedded as hand-written elements into the material of the pictures.

For her new series, she has further refined this principle by including image quotes from the canon of art history, for example, Bruegel's Tower of Babel or Titian's Diana. Similarly, she is also integrating pictorial images from sketches or drawings of live models. In Angela Dwyer's works, these different components are combined to form a closely woven synthesis of image and text, evoking associations of archaic, alchemistic processes. Ultimately, the individual elements remain identifiable, though they seem to have been exposed to some enormous heat or pressure that has melted them down to form an extract-like amalgam, cracked in places: multiple layers of paper overlapping or glued one over the other, the edges frayed and torn, the work left in a fragile, vulnerable state.

The magic of Angela Dwyer's pictures rests on the intensely sensual treatment of the material, the vital luminosity and delicate nuances of colour and her essential attitude towards the picture as an object. Her works are always very close to the realm of the studio, as if the transformation of the material has been left in a kind of intermediate stage, a limbo on the borders of hell. In this way, she transports the viewer into a world where the artistic act has a tangible presence – a presence perhaps last seen as vividly in Jacques Rivette's 1991 film masterpiece La belle noiseuse. Standing in front of Angela Dwyer's works, it seems as if one can hear the scratching of the charcoal, the crackle of pigment particles, the sound of a hand brushing across paper. These are existential witnesses of a dialogue where the artist remains present in two ways. Firstly, in the shape of the crafted processes and, secondly, in the form of an idea evident in the selection and use of the texts which, by offering a wealth of associations, allow each viewer to access the work differently.

Text by Marc Wellmann

Opening Friday February 1st, 2008, 7 pm

Galerie Volker Diehl
Lindenstrasse 35 D-10969 Berlin
Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday 11.00 - 18.00

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