Ellipse / Eclipse
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The Berlin–Paris 2010 gallery exchange, now in its third year, opened its first wave of shows in Berlin on Friday. Twenty-seven galleries participated, making use of the opportunity to introduce individual programmes and successful works to a new audience. Rather than pairing up only to ship in previously shown projects to a sister city, Galerija Gregor Podnar (Berlin) and schleicher + lange (Paris) chose to present a group exhibition combining artists from both their programmes. The result is ‘Ellipse / Eclipse’, an exhibition in two parts to be exhibited, with slightly different rosters, in both cities.
At Gregor Podnar, the show features five artists – two from Podnar and three from schleicher + lange – and is anchored by Evariste Richer’s eponymous work from 2004. Two enormous circular screens, such as those used to reflect light on film sets, stand at opposite ends of the gallery. Almost identical in scale, one flashes gold, the other silver. There is a magpie aspect to the work (‘Look! Shiny!’), but Richer’s objects project stature and elegance, setting the play of light – its alternating magnetism and fickleness on view throughout the show – into motion.
Light’s uncertainty, its alternating movement and stasis, is also on display in After (2007), a projection by Laurent Montaron. An image projected on the wall shows a man crouched in the midst of a snowy landscape. The white – that is, the light – areas of the image sputter softly and consistently, as the blades of a fan move through the projected light. The rhythmic whirring and flickering mimic the aural and visual output of a 35mm film projector, but, despite the constant movement of the light, the image remains static. Richer’s wall installation of dense laser prints, entitled Energie Cinétique (Kinetic Energy, 2005), also plays on this tension, as the prints, each speckled with white spites of varying densities, fade from light to dark as the eye moves across the wall.
Even objects free from the direct inscription of light successfully play on these themes. In Franziska Furter’s three large ink-and-pencil drawings on paper, black and white meet along jagged lines. In Draft IV (2009), licks and rays of white protrude into a black centre; the static meeting between positive and negative space nevertheless vibrates along the drawing’s precisely rendered edges.
Rather than the pointed and superficial introductions of other exchange exhibitions, ‘Ellipse / Eclipse’ sets the work of five artists working in different cities in dialogue with one another. Part two of the exhibition will open in Paris on 29 January, with complementary works on similar themes by a slightly different roster of artists.
Anna Altman
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
