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https://virtualresidency.p-10.ru/

In October I started an online Residency at VIRTUAL SPAR, St. Petersburg Art Residency. I’m currently writing a series of essays about my work during 2020.

In the end of Febuary 2020 I had my last exhibition before lockdown times:

It happened to take place in a non-commercial independent art space in the city center of Munich, called “Weltraum”. The exhibition named “Fragile” unintendedly matched the situation.

I showed current works from 2019/2020, connected to my artist in residency stay in Japan in 2019 – what seems quite far away from the perspective of now.

 

 

 

 

 

It was a quite strange to have an exhibition with the focus on traveling and intercultural experiences within an artist’s praxis at this point of time.

We provided disinfectant sprays and kept distance, nobody hugged or shook hands, people were tensed and everyone had realized, that the situation was serious, not somehow far away but really present. And that it was quite unsure when we could go somewhere abroad again, even within Europe.

 

 

In the first room I showed drawings on 100 years old Japanese paper. I stayed at a really tiny village in the mountain area at the district of Niigata, with about 40 people living there, growing rice and vegetables and that artist in Residency place called “Yamakiwa Gallery and Art Hotel”, run by Yuri Fukushima, an artist who originally came from Tokyo. She had been given this really old paper and handed it to artists who came to her place for to live and work there for a month.

 

 

 

I developed a series of drawings, ink on paper, named “The other hand”. The paper is drawn on both sides. As it is semi-transparent, the parts of the drawing which are placed on the other side slightly shine through the surface of the paper.

There exist two slightly different versions of the drawing which can’t be seen at the same time and the reading direction of the image changes in the moment the paper is turned around.

For the show in Munich I developed an installation which both allowed the drawings to float like banners in the exhibition space and made the two sides visible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the second room I showed a series of watercolor drawings and an almost 20 meters long drawing on Japanese paper, “Mutares”, which I installed with magnets on walls and the ceiling, so the drawing got a flowing ductus and formed a space within the space.

The drawing appears as a nonlinear narrative, a cascade of abstract and figurative motives combining Japanese techniques inspired by sumi-e drawings and my own visual language.

The figures are ambivalent shape shifters with animalistic and human traits, they are companions, like the daimones from antique times. Their expressions and actions seem contradictory: they could be dancing or fighting or could be sexually involved, they shift between good and bad, happiness and lonesomeness at the same time as well as between figuration and abstraction. The drawing is accompanied by small creatures made of paper clay placed on the drawing and on the floor.

 

 

https://virtualresidency.p-10.ru/

In October I started an online Residency at VIRTUAL SPAR, St. Petersburg Art Residency. I’m currently writing a series of essays about my work during 2020.

The first two posts are about my work in general.

My name is Nina Annabelle Märkl and I’m an artist based in Munich.

In my series of posts I would like to introduce myself and my work and share projects I did during lockdown times and the current pandemic time in general.

How does the scenario in which we currently live, that “new normality” change our individual ways of working and thinking as artists?

How can we communicate our view on the world, how can we show our works in times of isolation of which we don’t know yet how it will change us as human beings in our social relations? This virtual residency is a perfect medium for exchange and sharing artistic worlds and ideas.

My work shifts between drawing, sculpture and installation.

I create settings in which I often combine modular objects of welded steel with drawings. Real spaces and possible spaces fall into one developing a game of permeability between the beholder, the space and the imagination.

The installations and settings invite the beholder to become part of a nonlinear narration, both as recipient and as an active counterpart, questioning the structures and presets within the own perception.

Drawing is seen as an instrument of possibility, comparable to a laboratory for different ways of perception and creation of the spaces and relations we are living in.

The impact of my work focuses on the individual structures of human beings in relation to the world and other people, on the permeability of interior and exterior spaces.

The first photo shows an installations of steel objects, called “frames”. It is a modular system and so the objects of steel can build various spatial settings. They are combined with different drawings inviting the beholder to experience them like a walkable, reduced landscape. The beholder has to change perspective when walking through the installation. The ways in which drawings, space and objects are experienced change as if you find yourself as part of a kaleidoscope.

The next pictures show a series of drawings made of welded steel in combination with drawings on paper (ink, pencil, sometimes cutouts) called “Off Ornament”. They are derived from measurements of a church, referring in fragments to the ornaments of the windows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I’m working within the media of drawing with a sculptural approach, drawing and sculpture for me mainly are the same thing – they are both dealing with the complexity of real and possible spaces and with the ways in which we are connected to those different spheres as permeable beings. The difference lies in the process of perception or let’s say both media show different aspects of the topic: The reduced line of a drawing opens up a complex system of possible spaces unfolding as imaginary space between the beholder and the work.

The installation shows a material space, which seems capable at first glance but is then discovered as landscape that cannot be captured at one glance as it changes with each shift of perspective. My work is about these changes and about states that neither can be named or fixed. It is about permeability.

 

 

 

 

 

The works are settled between narration and abstraction, between gesture and precision, between closeness and distance: Antifragile constellations – forming neither-nor or both-and situations. The single works like objects, drawings or modules develop site-specific dialogues. They are like actors who can change their roles according to the setting they are in. The motives remind to some part of everyday life scenes. Constellations and objects thereby are transformed and translated. In their condensed way they slightly remind of their origin creating situations of what I describe as the experience of an almost-déja vu.

The next images show one of these landscape-like installations of drawings and objects, it’s called “Permeable Entities”, Artothek Munich, 2016/2017.