Nymphius Projekte: Exhibitions by Friederike Nymphius
IDA EKBLAD / MARKUS KARSTIESS
14. January - 27. March 2010
The broadly based repertoire of the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad (b. 1980/NO) includes video performances, totem-like sculptures of found objects and painting. Ekblad‘s painting is rooted in the permeation of everyday life by images that have been deeply etched into the collective memory. The gestural/expressive painting style of the artist calls to mind the early paintings of Jackson Pollock. Their emotional gestures condense the moment of the picture’s creation between the past and the present, between radical obliteration and renewal. Consequently, Ida Ekblad’s paintings do not portray the world but create it anew in poetic stories and unexpected constellations. For her first presentation in Berlin, the artist will display a series of pictures especially created for this exhibition. The artist did participate at the mile-stone exhibition “Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum, NY 2009.
The ceramic sculptures of Markus Karstiess (b. 1971/DE) oscillate between amorphous-intricate metamorphoses of art noveau and organic growth. Gleaming silvery chandeliers and glazes that look like grey lava give his vase-like objects an inscrutable personality of their own. They portray the origin of form, reveal the fragile moment in which the mass turns into the form and manifests as the body. Perforations expose the insights and perspectives, simultaneously evoking the ceramics of Lucio Fontana. Karstiess opens the view for what is concealed behind. His sculptures combine the real with an illusionistic space in which the inside and outside merge. In the process, the destruction of the form is transformed into a search for new messages and myths, as well as the opportunity of expanding material space with a new sensual dimension.
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