MARIKA & ALEXANDER
Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna, 2015
The works in this exhibition are primarily centering around the notion of building : bodybuilding supplement vases filled with leftover metal scraps are positioned around a garden tent fabric loosely hung over wooden stretchers, a pedestal made out of wood discarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vienna and 4 monochromes painted with Duluxs’ ‘Colors Of The World’ wall paint palette resting against the wall.
Touching upon the themes of metabolic exhaustion and logistical afterlife, the objects map a closed-loop 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 possibiilities and conditions of building today, be it a body, a sculpture, a structure, an environment, an exhibition or a world.
The main installation is organized around the loosely hung garden tent : the makeshift shelter of the loosely hung fabric tent portrays an unfinished, unsafe transient architecture, its plastic transparent windows redirecting to the Renaissance secular idea of painting as a window to the world - surrounded by mine-like objects occupying the space around it.
Protein supplement powder containers (Still Lives) - engineered for hyper-metabolism, muscle hypertrophy, and self-optimization for building the body as a relentless productivity machine – filled with skeletal ikebana-like arrangements of metal rods, thin dark stems, perforated strips and flexible wires – some capped with bright orange painting rolls – harvesting and recontextualizing the raw, unproductive tension contained in the found gestures.
The sewn fabric work (Endgame I) is using a hyperstretchable synthetic material, Lycra (invented ca. 1958 for womens shapewear and medical purposes) to display the dead end of a corner as a direct opposition to the same Renaissance vision of the painting, pointing towards stretching as a loaded gesture (for machismo, art historical and beyond) signifying tension, control and the surface as a site of mastery.
The four monochrome paintings (Do I Move You ?) resting on the floor deconstruct the monochromes’ historical claim to purity : domesticated by Dulux Palette (Scandinavian Spirit, African Adventure, Cuban Harmony, Mediterranean Moments) the meaning of the painting-as-window is further deconstructed and exposed as a standardized, consumer-packaged geopolitical fantasy.
The pedestal (Pedestal) made out of scrap wood, discarded after a temporary exhibition at the Mumok, displays the signs of the process of discarding itself – in a gesture of recycling, laying bare its own physical infrastructure, questioning who is propping up whom and the invisible labor going on behind the scenes of the institution.
With this group of works, the show takes a set of canonized, historically macho or ideologically ‘pure’ art gestures – the stretched canvas, the sovereign monochrome, the museum-sanctioned plinth, the sanctity of composition and authorship – and infiltrates each with a materially or procedurally domestic, decorative, or corporate - commercial counter logic, questioning at which point labor and gesture get institutionally legitimated, substituting the coding at the exact point where the form would normally assert its authority. How much pressure can a material, a body, or an institution withstand before its structural integrity collapse into mere packaging ? The works occupy that exact tension point : the precarious space just before total exhaustion, where everything is propped up by leftovers, structural scraps, and chemical color swatches, holding its own breath against collapse.
MARIKA & ALEXANDER
Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna, 2015
The works in this exhibition are primarily centering around the notion of building : bodybuilding supplement vases filled with leftover metal scraps are positioned around a garden tent fabric loosely hung over wooden stretchers, a pedestal made out of wood discarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vienna and 4 monochromes painted with Duluxs’ ‘Colors Of The World’ wall paint palette resting against the wall.
Touching upon the themes of metabolic exhaustion and logistical afterlife, the objects map a closed-loop 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 possibiilities and conditions of building today, be it a body, a sculpture, a structure, an environment, an exhibition or a world.
The main installation is organized around the loosely hung garden tent : the makeshift shelter of the loosely hung fabric tent portrays an unfinished, unsafe transient architecture, its plastic transparent windows redirecting to the Renaissance secular idea of painting as a window to the world - surrounded by mine-like objects occupying the space around it.
Protein supplement powder containers (Still Lives) - engineered for hyper-metabolism, muscle hypertrophy, and self-optimization for building the body as a relentless productivity machine – filled with skeletal ikebana-like arrangements of metal rods, thin dark stems, perforated strips and flexible wires – some capped with bright orange painting rolls – harvesting and recontextualizing the raw, unproductive tension contained in the found gestures.
The sewn fabric work (Endgame I) is using a hyperstretchable synthetic material, Lycra (invented ca. 1958 for womens shapewear and medical purposes) to display the dead end of a corner as a direct opposition to the same Renaissance vision of the painting, pointing towards stretching as a loaded gesture (for machismo, art historical and beyond) signifying tension, control and the surface as a site of mastery.
The four monochrome paintings (Do I Move You ?) resting on the floor deconstruct the monochromes’ historical claim to purity : domesticated by Dulux Palette (Scandinavian Spirit, African Adventure, Cuban Harmony, Mediterranean Moments) the meaning of the painting-as-window is further deconstructed and exposed as a standardized, consumer-packaged geopolitical fantasy.
The pedestal (Pedestal) made out of scrap wood, discarded after a temporary exhibition at the Mumok, displays the signs of the process of discarding itself – in a gesture of recycling, laying bare its own physical infrastructure, questioning who is propping up whom and the invisible labor going on behind the scenes of the institution.
With this group of works, the show takes a set of canonized, historically macho or ideologically ‘pure’ art gestures – the stretched canvas, the sovereign monochrome, the museum-sanctioned plinth, the sanctity of composition and authorship – and infiltrates each with a materially or procedurally domestic, decorative, or corporate - commercial counter logic, questioning at which point labor and gesture get institutionally legitimated, substituting the coding at the exact point where the form would normally assert its authority. How much pressure can a material, a body, or an institution withstand before its structural integrity collapse into mere packaging ? The works occupy that exact tension point : the precarious space just before total exhaustion, where everything is propped up by leftovers, structural scraps, and chemical color swatches, holding its own breath against collapse.