Gebilde
November 30, 2006- January 6, 2007
Reception: November 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
521 W 21st St
Gallery two
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is delighted to present Gebilde,
Sabine Hornig’s
third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Blurring the divisions between two-dimensional and three dimensional
space, the new photographs and sculptures shown in Gebilde create a
fusion between photography and sculpture, presenting work in each
medium that supports and expands upon the other. The title of the
show, Gebilde, references this overlap, translating into English most
closely to “construct”, Gebilde means “shape” or “creation” and can
only be used to describe three dimensional objects. “Bild” however,
means image, thus Gebilde refers the overlap between two-dimensional
and three-dimensional elements.
Explorations and challenges of traditional spatial orientation are
inherent in Sabine’s work as the subject of her photography and
sculpture is most often existing architecture; she reproduces and
recreates the locations that are featured in her pieces, on a new scale
or in a different dimension. As in past works the pieces included in
Gebilde examine the architecture of the city, focusing specifically on
abandoned spaces. The apparent emptiness of these images gives way to
the imagined presence of past or future structures, referencing both
destruction and creation, each inhabiting the space equally, and
presenting the city as a sort of a random urban wilderness.
There is a rough, almost brutal quality to the locations that Hornig
has chosen to photograph, as though something has been roughly torn out
of the space, furthering the sense of transformation towards
disintegration. In the project gallery, “Window with No Floor I” and
“Window with No Floor II”, show unfinished brick interiors in which the
floor is not pictured, giving the room an endless, dissolving feeling,
and challenging conventional notions of finite “interior” space.
“Window with No Back Wall” in the gallery’s entryway shows a
construction yard enclosed by a grate; no rear wall shuts off the area
and the viewer can look through where the wall might have been once, or
might be in the future.
The sculptures in the main gallery are three-dimensional manifestations
of the layered images in the photographs. The work “Blechhütte” or
“Tin Hut” deals with themes of inversion, contrasting light and dark
and interior and exterior space by juxtaposing a solid, sturdy, and
opaque rectangular box with the bright and transparent scaffolding-like
structure that surrounds it. On a pane of glass there is a strip of
negative which depicts a waste-landscape that references the adjacent
sculpture, “Landscape”, locating the two in the same surroundings.
“Landscape” is a five-part window, which has been placed like a folding
screen toward the rear of the gallery. Through the “window” we see
transparent sections of the plastic waste of a landfill, the vibrant
colors of the discarded refuse compliment the blue sky, and
simultaneously contrast the man-made and the natural, creating a
spectacularly beautiful image out the most unlikely material, and
presenting another inversion, garbage elevated to art.
Living and working in Berlin, Hornig exhibits widely; her work is
currently part of Constructing New Berlin, Bass Art Museum Miami,
through January 21, 2007 (group). Other recent exhibitions include,
The Second Room, Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, 2005 (solo); Beyond
Delirious: Architecture in Selected Photographs from the Ella Fontanals
Cisneros Collection, Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, Miami 2005
(group); Collección De Fotografía Contemporánea de Telefónica, Museo de
Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Spain, 2005 (group); and Projects 78, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003 (solo); among others.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show| Location | map | | Gallery | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery | | Address | 521 W 21st St New York (Chelsea) NY, 10011 United States | | Phone | 212-414-4144 | | Fax | 212-414-1535 | | Hours | Tue-Sat 10-6 | |
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