by Evelyn Pschak
Why should hand drawings remain within the restricted boundaries of a sketchbook or plane frameworks?
As far as the young graphic artist Nina Märkl is concerned, they absolutely don´t have to.
She offers some space to her lines, strokes and stripes. “I work in and with the media of drawing. Thereby drawing became both a medium of presentation and cogitation“, the artist says.
In the course of a European art grant she´s been awarded, Märkl sojourned in Poland, where she discovered old, disused drawers in a backyard of Szczecin. Those places of “deposit and oblivion“, as Nina Märkl seized them, inspired the artist to ally two-dimensionality and stereoscopic vision “My work ranges at the interface of drawing and space“, the artist states.
A comment easily traceable while contemplating the wooden drawers that turned out to become “All these mermaids“. By little means, Märkl converted the formerly discarded chests, put them in upright position, filled their hollow with cut out graphite scenes and protected the evolved narrative underneath thin sheets of glass. (…)
The showcased sequences could be seen like very personal gender studies that pick out “gestures of adolescence“ as a central theme. Displayed as in a raree show, or better a cabinet of curiosities, the drawers stage a microcosm of everyday action. (…)
Here, the artist shows her close relationship to the Wunderkammer of Renaissance Europe and its categorizations amidst sciences like ethnography or natural history-and to its antecedent ideas, where the Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or a theater of the world. For that´s also the way Nina Märkl looks at her own work today: “The observer moves through the extensive installation of drawings and objects, which I interweave to a microcosm.“
She doesn´t only demonstrate her expansive impetus by arranging giggling young protagonists, sleeping beauties, landscapes, floral elements and sewing-machines to precious little stage settings, but uses all kind of ruses to carry her lines into the showroom.
Märkl even intervenes architecturally, limitating exhibition scenography with room filling black steel pipe constructions that draft abstract figures and contours right into the exhibition space. The steel objects don´t only plot their own setting, they also frame little graphit drawings-without deliminating them.
Instead, they release the drawings to their spatial fulfillment and thus become themselves elements oft he drawn narration. Just like in “All these mermaids“, Nina Märkl offers the contemplator a walkable panorama and allows him-and her art-to conquer the surrounding space.-Or encloses him in her micro-cosmological world model, you never know. But on the other hand: who wouldn´t want to be enlaced by Märkl´s effortless, easy adjacencies? …Exactly.