Exhibitions

past

It's a Womans's World

14/08/2015 - 26/09/2015

It’s a Womans’s World

With the exhibition of two international, contemporary top artists Gallery 2CforArt is ringing a crucial phase of the Summer Festival in Salzburg. Drawings and paintings by Cornelia Schleime interact with large size paper collages by the Korean artist SEO. The opening is taking place on Friday, August 14 at 6pm. Cornelia Schleime is present.

Cornelia Schleime is a unique personality in the artistic landscape of Germany. She is the allrounder par excellence. Many of those portrayed in her pieces set their views out of the work. In her work eyes, the view is omnipresent. Cornelia Schleime is a master of the reviewing image. Often the viewer feels seen, sometimes even caught or rumbled. The motifs appear large and often cut on paper or canvas. They are pushing out from the image. Despite the variance of her motifs there are a number of constants which run through her work. The extraordinary ability to balance between a powerful expression and sensitivity is very characteristic for Schleime´s work.

At first glance drawings from the series Camouflage appear strange. They show images in a new, radical way: humans and animals fuse to fantastic zoomorphic hybrid creatures. What distinguishes them is the amazing feature to return the viewer’s gaze intensely. Without references to mythology and religion Cornelia Schleime´s work can rather be regarded as a series of experiments on the possibilities and limits of the portrait. The title refers to techniques of camouflage and concealment: The women in the camouflage images hide in their animalistic metamorphoses. For what reason they are looking for protection, remains open. The only certainty is that they do not engage in flirtatious hiding game whose objective is to be discovered.

The unique rice paper collage by SEO have already enjoyed worldwide admiration for a long time. From the beginning of her studies as a master student of Georg Baselitz the artist lives her life between two cultures. This ambivalent approach is consistently reflected in SEO’s work. Her reduced and colorful collages broach the dangers of globalization and equalization. Main topics in SEO’s aesthetic intellectual world are reflection and contemplation. SEO also challenges the viewer to do the same. SEO’s comprehensive and multifaceted artistic work has already found its way into the most important collections and museums, for example, into the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

In SEO’s studio in Berlin handmade, multicolored papers are torn by hand to long, thin strips. These papers store in hundreds of tanks, sorted strictly by colors or print. The papers, some of them being printed after a certain pattern, are manufactured in Korea according tot he artist’s instructions. With these strips of paper SEO ‘builds’ her paintings. She individually sticks the paper strips onto the grounded canvas and paints them – at least five painted layers superimposed one above the other. Thousands of paper strips form a homogeneously bonded ‘second skin’ on the canvas.

For example, the silky-fine paper strips grow to the individual ears of corn in SEO’s corn field paintings. A haptic texture, an allover collage covers the canvas which results in a relief-fine depth. The papers, made from the rice plant only permit paint with acrylics because oil would stick to the paper layer. The textured canvas consists of countless skin-like paper strips which become painted deposits. Just like a rice field is more than the sum of all rice plant stems, SEO’s procedure transforms the additive amount of paper strips and paint applications to a painting of complex contemplation.