Valerie Krause / Astali / Peirce

Doppio solo-show di Valerie Krause | Immaterial e Tolia Astali & Dylan Peirce | Crash Blossoms.

Comunicato stampa

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce Immaterial, the first solo show by German artist Valerie Krause in the gallery space in Berlin. Through her sculptures and black and white photographs Krause creates special configuration and environments, which evoke ephemeral moments of movement, replacement and transition. Her sculptures adopt elementary forms: they are not strictly geometrical constructs, but shapes that seem to assume movement in space, accompanied by a gentle minimization of the forms and static liquidity. Space, movement, and movement in space are central themes in Krause's artistic research. The emphasis of the movement confronts itself with static moments, symbols of peace and calmness, gestures of pause and hesitation, which are also present in her photography. The same dichotomy is found in the use of the materials, colours and in the layout of the works in space. Straight lines meet with openly formulated shapes, defined by twisting or little rotations. A long shaft made by brightly-blue painted wood spreads out from the wall, drawing a dry diagonal, bounding space, while in the middle of the room a trunk-shaped sculpture imposes its bulkiness. The massive concrete piece strongly hinders with the light and wavy aluminium plate next to it. At some point the angularity begins to change, metal replace concrete, the forms become more open, direction changes. Immaterial (2013), work entitling the show, seems as made by a different material, light, fragile, about to start moving at any moment. It's the immaterial embodied in the firmness of the physical that affects Krause and indicates the key to understand these idiosyncratic objects, in suspended balance, endeavouring to rise above their inner gravity effects. In Krause's photography we find similar coordinates: the verticality of architectural lines in some of her previous works, alternates now with curves of light and shadows of moving subjects. Breaches of light, gaps and contrasts are once again key players of the artist's narrative, showing sensitivity in solid materials that cannot go unnoticed.

BIOGRAPHY
Valerie Krause was born in Herdecke, Germany, in 1976. She graduated in 2007 at the Düsseldorf Academy with David Rabinowitch and Didier Vermeiren. She currently has a teaching assignment at the in Düsseldorf Academy. In 2008 she was awarded at Art Cologne (16th-20th April 2008) with the first "Audi Art Award for New Talent” which included the realization of a solo exhibition at the Cologne Artothek and the publication of an exhibition catalogue. Space, movement, and movement in space are central topics to her work both in her sculptures and photographs. Her work was exhibited in many international galleries such as Galerie Heinz Holtman, Cologne (2012); Galerie Greta Meert, Bruxelles (2011); Galerie K4, Munch (2008) and institution such as the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf in 2012, the bbb centre régional d’initiatives art contemporain Toulouse and the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2008.

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is delighted to announce Crash Blossoms, the first solo show by artists duo Astali / Peirce in the gallery space in Berlin. For this occasion, the artists will present a site-specific installation which revolves around the idea of a publication release, entitling the show and featuring all the images displayed in the exhibition. Astali / Peirce have assembled intricate montages of found black and white images that are inserted into a set frame of printed text. The text belongs to the standard 'Lorem Ipsum', used since the 1500s as a placeholder for the printing and typesetting industries. This formula, commonly used to delineate the graphic elements of visual presentations, is composed by a mangled section of a 1st century Latin treatise on good and evil, written by Cicero. The binary space of Cicero's text finds its double in the cutouts and holes of the images. The montages - each one separately framed - are set horizontally on metal structures: on these rails some frames disappear underneath others, hiding images or showing only parts of them, in a repetitive succession of solid and voids, cracks and discontinuities. Starting point of the whole installation is the idea of the publication release, Crash Blossoms, from which all the surrounding elements develop as components of a singular disrupted narrative. The title itself is a copy editor term for syntactic ambiguity, where news headlines suggest apocryphal contents that can only be partially revealed. Through the playing out of these components parts, Astali / Peirce's new works rearrange themselves as visual anagrams, where fractured images create an excess of fractured meaning, destabilizing habits of association, while courting the sense of a crystallised static motion.

BIOGRAPHY
Tolia Astali was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1974 and Dylan Peirce was born in Paris, France, in 1977. They live and work in
Berlin. Astali & Peirce have been collaborating since 2000, when they met on the postgraduate program at Chelsea College of Art in
London, UK. They have since shown their collaborative work, consisting of sculptures, photographic prints, hybrid media, as well
as sound and video installations, including at Fordham Gallery, London, UK (2001), Kunstwerke, Berlin, Kunstverein Konstanz DE, Glassbox in Paris FR. Over recent years they have held solo exhibitions at La Centrale, Montreal (Astali/Peirce 2009), Petra Rink Galerie, Düsseldorf (Astali/Peirce, 2009; Insular, 2011), The Chain | Map, Düsseldorf (Interiors, 2012), Autocenter, Berlin (Seams, 2012), and a presentations at Les Ateliers de Rennes - Biennial for Contemporary Art 2013