MARIKA & ALEXANDER
Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna, 2015
The works in this duo exhibition, centered around the notion of building, take a set of canonized, ideologically ‘pure’ art gestures – the stretched canvas, the painting-as-window, the sovereign monochrome, the museum-sanctioned plinth – and infiltrate each with a materially or procedurally domestic, decorative, or corporate - commercial counter logic, questioning at which point labor and gesture get institutionally legitimated.
Organized around the loosely hung garden tent, standing in as a makeshift shelter - its transparent windows pointing towards the Renaissance idea of painting as a window to the world - mine-like protein supplement powder containers, engineered for muscle hypertrophy and self-optimization, are filled with skeletal ikebana-like arrangements of metal rods, thin dark stems, perforated strips and flexible wires. The sewn fabric work made out of hyperstretchable Lycra - invented circa 1958 for womens shapewear and medical purposes – stitches together the dead end of a corner. The four paintings resting on the floor deconstruct the monochromes’ historical claim to purity : domesticated by Dulux Palette “Colors of the World” (Scandinavian Spirit, African Adventure, Cuban Harmony, Mediterranean Moments) the meaning of the painting-as-window is further exposed as a consumer-packaged geopolitical fantasy. The pedestal constructed by scrap wood discarded after a temporary exhibition at the Mumok, displays the signs of the process of discarding itself - laying bare its own physical infrastructure, questioning who is propping up whom and the invisible labor going on behind the scenes of the institution.
Touching upon the themes of metabolic exhaustion and logistical afterlife, the objects map an ecosystem where production and waste are locked in a continuous cycle, staging a quiet rebellion against the systems of production and display, institutional labor and consumer culture. Through traditionally gendered practices and gestures such as arranging, decorating and sewing, the works question the possibilities and conditions of building today, be it a body, a sculpture, a structure, an environment, an exhibition or a world, occuping the precarious space just before total exhaustion, where everything is propped up by leftovers, structural scraps and chemical color swatches.
MARIKA & ALEXANDER
Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna, 2015
The works in this duo exhibition, centered around the notion of building, take a set of canonized, ideologically ‘pure’ art gestures – the stretched canvas, the painting-as-window, the sovereign monochrome, the museum-sanctioned plinth – and infiltrate each with a materially or procedurally domestic, decorative, or corporate - commercial counter logic, questioning at which point labor and gesture get institutionally legitimated.
Organized around the loosely hung garden tent, standing in as a makeshift shelter - its transparent windows pointing towards the Renaissance idea of painting as a window to the world - mine-like protein supplement powder containers, engineered for muscle hypertrophy and self-optimization, are filled with skeletal ikebana-like arrangements of metal rods, thin dark stems, perforated strips and flexible wires. The sewn fabric work made out of hyperstretchable Lycra - invented circa 1958 for womens shapewear and medical purposes – stitches together the dead end of a corner. The four paintings resting on the floor deconstruct the monochromes’ historical claim to purity : domesticated by Dulux Palette “Colors of the World” (Scandinavian Spirit, African Adventure, Cuban Harmony, Mediterranean Moments) the meaning of the painting-as-window is further exposed as a consumer-packaged geopolitical fantasy. The pedestal constructed by scrap wood discarded after a temporary exhibition at the Mumok, displays the signs of the process of discarding itself - laying bare its own physical infrastructure, questioning who is propping up whom and the invisible labor going on behind the scenes of the institution.
Touching upon the themes of metabolic exhaustion and logistical afterlife, the objects map an ecosystem where production and waste are locked in a continuous cycle, staging a quiet rebellion against the systems of production and display, institutional labor and consumer culture. Through traditionally gendered practices and gestures such as arranging, decorating and sewing, the works question the possibilities and conditions of building today, be it a body, a sculpture, a structure, an environment, an exhibition or a world, occuping the precarious space just before total exhaustion, where everything is propped up by leftovers, structural scraps and chemical color swatches.