Jusqu’au 2 février 2019
ChertLüdde, Berlin
ChertLüdde is pleased to present Being and Your Own Form, the second solo exhibition of Zora Mann (b. 1979, Amersham, UK) at the gallery. Mann is exhibiting a new body of work consisting of paintings, sculptures and a collaborative installation with Øyvind Renberg.
Being and Your Own Form brings together the psychic and the spiritual with the physical and objective. In doing so, a holistic whole generates oppositions and contradictions just as much as harmony. Omnipresence and one’s own form are both located in space and determine it.
Zora Mann’s works thematize the relational proportion of this whole with a focus on space, body and (formal) language. Thereby forms that are supposedly separate can be evinced as unifying elements of being.
“I contradict myself because I am big, I contradict myself because I contain all the opposites, because I am all.”1
The wooden shields are painted with acrylic and or oil in bright, at times gaudy, colors. They recall psychedelic dreams or pigments used in nature to entice or give warning. The shields’ forms have shifted from a structure originally used to protect the torso or the entire body to a more permeable, freer shape. This lends them a certain being-like quality because they now reveal an essence rather than conceal it. They expose the view of space and body, even focus; open new perspectives and produce relations. While the forms of her earlier works were borrowed from classic police shields—with closed forms and a demarcation of front and rear —the new shields attest to a diverse permeability. Handles, observation slits, and (in)definite forms suggest a functionality, but the performative act of constantly reexamining objects in a different way comes to the fore. The shields serve to protect, but more as a membrane or a filter, and thus as a mutual, conditional exchange.
The painting Preface depicts a shadowy face. The multi-layered application of color, as well as the individual elements of the image, reinforces the illusion of different planes. Jagged lines recall stairs nested inside one another. They float on the surface and crisscross round forms that depict eyes and oral cavities. The title Preface is quite ambiguous – literally interpreted as “pre-face”, it perhaps describes the aura as an invisible countenance that allows the body to be sensually experienced in space while nonetheless remaining inexplicable. As a foreword, it allows you to enter into a deeper narrative of tangible words, whereby here too the named and the signified always remain subjectively different.
In the gallery’s main room, visitors, in particular children, will be greeted by the collaborative work Haven2 , an installation created on the occasion of the book fair Friends With Books (2018) with the artist Øyvind Renberg and both artists’ mothers. At the heart of the installation is an accessible spiral ammonite staircase that invites you to climb. Eyes, textile felt fruits, beads, and animals, as well as geometric figures, can be recreated again and again to form a colorful and surreal image. Haven is a place of play that is permanently transformed through active participation.
Text by Imke Kannegießer
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