• Contact
• Artists
• Future
• Current
• Past
• News
• Publications

EVA BERENDES - THE SOMERSET CURTAIN

26 MAY - 31 AUG 2011
OPENING WEDNESDAY 25 MAY, 6-9pm


Berlin-based German artist Eva Berendes (°1974) is part of a generation of younger practitioners who have self-confidently revived critical interest in various seemingly archaic traditions of ‘artisanal’ artistic production – without relapsing, however, into a naive romance of craft and manufacture for its own melancholy sake. Berendes has long been known primarily for her sculptural, three-dimensional works using textiles, cloth and thread: monumental, billowing curtains such as the one currently on display in the gallery, as well as freestanding, colorful screens and similar spatial devices that are, paradoxically, transparent – simultaneously reminding us of the poetic, minimalist thread ‘sculptures’ of Lygia Pape and Fred Sandback, and of the constructivist art of the early Soviet period, when a remarkable group of enterprising female artists hastened the integration of ‘applied’ (textile) arts into the rarefied, hierarchically rigid domain of fine arts. In a more recent series of works using silk on the one hand and plaster casts on the other hand (one example of which is also on view in the current exhibition), Berendes deliberately alludes to the apparent collapse of three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, thus further complicating her exploration of the fractious border region between support/structure and surface/ornament – a process helped along by the repeated referencing of the ‘wrong’ side of late seventies, early eighties design culture (I am thinking of post-Memphis furniture design in particular here).
Ornament, yes, but Verbrechen, no, or not yet – that seems to be the spirit animating The Somerset Curtain still (the title refers to the site of the work’s first showing), a large-scale black-and-white patterned curtain whose curve cuts the gallery space in two neat halves, as if enacting the very artificial divide between the fundamentals of sculpture’s thingness and the embellishing hand’s surface effect. Indeed, the curtain’s robust angular pattern and austere color scheme appear much closer in spirit to Weimar and Malevich than the Memphis aesthetic whose ambiguous influences can be seen to pop up in Berendes’ more recent forays into sculpture, such as the work exhibited in the aptly titled Making is Thinking group show organized at Witte de With center for contemporary art in Rotterdam earlier this year.

In the last few years, Eva Berendes has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Frankfurt, London, New York, Sheffield and Zürich, and her sculptures have also been included in group shows such as Construction and its Shadow at Leeds Arts Gallery, Bilder über Bilder at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, pt. 2: The Thing in Mechelen. Her work is currently on view in exhibitions in MARRES Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, and the Leeds Arts Gallery. This Summer and Fall, Berendes will also participate in group shows in London, the Isle of Bute in Scotland, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Bielefelder Kunstverein.