Helen Marten - Satellite TV - 2019
British artist Helen Marten works across sculpture, painting, and writing to create a body of work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Alluding to language, systems, and intentionality, her work across all media sets out to imagine the miraculous substructure beneath the veneer of our habitual lives. In her edition “Satellite TV,” luminous colors set apart the characters at the center ofwhat appears to be a theatrical scene.
The edition is based on a drawing that Marten digitally decomposed into six basic colors and translated back into a work of graphic art by lithographing one painted layer after another. The analog technique endows each print with tiny irregularities and fingerprints, painterly traces of the printing process that breathe the same life into the figures that distinguishes the Turner Prize-winning artist’s works.
A boy on the left edge of the picture is extending his clenched fist toward the three other figures in an ambiguous gesture. Is he angry, or trying to hand them something? Is he a spectator, or involved in what is happening? We cannot tell. His posture brings the ancient device of teichoscopy to mind, in which a messenger relates events that are invisible to the spectators. Yet he is also inserting himself into the action, breaching the theater’s traditional fourth wall. Large eyes and open mouths – we can almost overhear their murmurs – frames the scene and underscores its dramatic quality.
Size: 40 x 60 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 A.P. + 1 P.P. + 1 S.P.,
Numbered and signed verso
Price: € 480
Jana Euler - Great White Fear, Horizon - 2019 SOLD OUT
Fear is a primary emotion, an instinctive response, something both animals and humans experience. Fear of the unknown, or monstrous, or that which may cause harm, describes in part what lurks beneath the sea, exemplified by the figure of the great white shark: a creature that one rarely encounters but whose image and reputation have become synonymous with fear and death. In her recent series “Great White Fear,” Jana Euler turns the fearsome into the fearful in eight paintings of these menacing giants of the deep, which she humanizes by adding facial expressions of distress and panic. These sharks are captured at the moment when they breach out of the water, erect against a lowered horizon, with heavily altered mid-sections to emphasize their phallic presence.For this edition, Euler further stretched and mirrored these paintings of great white sharks through digital manipulation, so that the individual characteristics become even more extreme in their expressions. These eight individual images, with digital doubles, are arranged differently for each edition, which can be hung upright or upside down, depending on the preferred version of what is above the waterline and what is captured in the reflective surface. The mirrored backdrop puts us squarely in this world of fear. But shiny metal things (mirrors or not) are, of course, used for bait, to lure fish to their own unhappy end. Fear, the phallus, attraction, the narcissistic gaze – could there be a more arch description of the present?Size: 45.5 x 85 cm
Edition: 100 + 22 A.P.
Numbered and signed verso
Price: € 680 SOLD OUTThese limited edition prints are available at Texte zur Kunst
