vanessa german: Rose Quartz, Love and Jubilance
The artist reflects on art as medicine in our accelerated world, discussing her new body of rose-quartz sculptures and their “invisible ingredients” at Frieze Los Angeles 2024
The artist reflects on art as medicine in our accelerated world, discussing her new body of rose-quartz sculptures and their “invisible ingredients” at Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Kasmin Gallery’s presentation at Frieze Los Angeles 2024 is the first to spotlight german’s developing use of rose quartz as a primary medium in her sculptural practice. In this body of work, which includes a dozen sculpted heads adorned with crystals alongside a larger assemblage figure, german draws on the material’s symbolic associations to invoke powerful themes of love, healing, resistance, and redemption. Featuring works realized especially for the fair, each artwork in the presentation is accompanied by an audio component in the form of “prayers” recorded by the artist, accessible on site for visitors to experience moment of spiritual reflection.
Rose quartz gives these sculptures their distinctive translucent pink color and light-reflective qualities. With documented use in ancient Mesopotamia through the present day, the crystals are representative of both the material nature of our existence—they are forms that emerge from the earth—and the unbounded nature of time and space, or the larger frequencies and spectrums on which our present lives exist. In line with german’s cultivation of ancestral wisdom, rose quartz is believed to encourage a reunification of body, mind and spirit, offered as a salve in a society overwhelmed by an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. In these works, german creates intricate surface patterns with the mineral, occasionally integrating additional natural materials including pyrite, blue lapis, chalcedony and strawberry quartz, over sculpted and painted plaster.
“I ask myself all the time, if I could make a work of art that had the power to do anything at this time, what would I want it to do?” —vanessa german
skateboard memorial to tyre nichols who screamed
out for his own mama to come for him while the police
were jumping on his back and taking his name out of
his soul and making him dead with their own
looseness of being and in the brutality of this
separation unaliving him for no reason other than
_________. Well. Or, skateboard as grief, 2023.
Grief, salt, sore throat from all the screaming, shoes
wore out in the soles from marching and begging—
then, a beautiful son gone, a beautiful son and his
name become a hashtag in the ever-expanding digital
memorials of children killed by ..., i don’t really know
what to say y’all, ok: heartbreak, fear, rage, tears,
crane hood ornament, rhinestones, adhesives, cloth,
rose quartz for the how the entire universe is held
together like how a womb. holds an entire human
together within an. Entire human
31.8 × 66 × 22.9 cm © 2024 vanessa german. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York. Photo by Charlie Rubin
Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Frieze Los Angeles is at Santa Monica Airport, February 29–March 3, 2024.
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