translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
070909: Sotheby’s Vienna: Artist Quarterly: Katharina Schendl – Icebergs
Sotheby’s Vienna: Artist Quarterly: Katharina Schendl – Icebergs
Staging gravity
Katharina Schendl created more of an installation than an exhibition of her work at Stotheby’s. In the middle of the room, three canvas tableaus rest against one another in a fan-shape, while two others lean nonchalantly against the rear walls, ignoring the stucco ledges. This is one part of the play with gravity. The other is found in the works themselves.
Targeted dripping, splashing, pouring, and the flowing-off of color are essential artistic methods implemented instead of brush, spatula, and fingers. Schendl discovered her own method of exposing liquid color media to gravity. A specific motif is not in the foreground, rather the replica of structure; her paintings are clotted structure. Influenced by the surfaces of icebergs – crystalline, bizarre, the artist created stylized enlargements of these structures in grid-like models. The canvas, which was spread over these structures, features the corresponding heights and depths of a hilly landscape. Here Schendl applies an abundance of black as well as white China ink, each finding its own shortest path to the lowest point on the canvas, similar to a drop of water on a rain-wet window pane. The China ink has an astringent effect and creates furrows on the canvas. Detached from the model and spanned into a metal frame, the canvas is forced into a two-dimensional plane, but the three dimensional is preserved. The extensive and partly lazed working-over in a white-gray-black scale allows the flow trail to shine through in the sidelight. And lastly, the open view of the backside of the “life-size” paintings emphasizes the acknowledgement towards the set up, towards the background, towards the supporting structure. One of these grid objects is applied “weightlessly” on the wall – practically paraded.
By Aurelia Jurtschitsch
Sotheby’s Vienna
1010 Vienna, Herrengasse 5, until 10.09.09
www.sothebys.com
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070909
Sotheby`s Wien
1010 Wien, Herrengasse 5
Tel: +43-1-512 47 72, Fax: +43-1-513 48 67
http://www.sothebys.com/de/inside/locations-worldwide/vienna/overview.html
Öffnungszeiten: Mo-Fr 9-17 h
Juli & August: Fr 9-13 h
Sotheby`s Wien
1010 Wien, Herrengasse 5
Tel: +43-1-512 47 72, Fax: +43-1-513 48 67
http://www.sothebys.com/de/inside/locations-worldwide/vienna/overview.html
Öffnungszeiten: Mo-Fr 9-17 h
Juli & August: Fr 9-13 h