The
Love Artist
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The
Love Artist
Breitengraser – room for contemporary sculpture, Berlin
The Love Artist showcased three distinct groups of works: a series of
manipulated photographs, a shelf of romantic novels and a rack of ’girlie’ beach
towels with embroidered text.
Excerpt from press release:
Articulated around the theme of eroticism, The Love Artist presents
itself as an installation in three complementary parts.
The main gallery features two bodies of found objects, one a set of ’girlie’
beach towels, the other a collection of Mills and Boon romantic novels, popular
in the UK and Australia. Displayed on specially conceived structures, both groupings
have been assembled to form autonomous sculptural objects. The two formally heterogenous
categories of objects are linked by their use of aesthetic qualities current
in popular imagery related to eroticism; both sets refer to ideas and representation
of wanting and desire – rather than their counterpart in reality.
In the back gallery, a series of manipulated photographs of contemporary couples
echoes the peculiar gusto of the towels. Each picture furthermore carries a specific
title emulating the catchy style characteristic of dime novels the world over.
Unlike the generic figures on the book covers, however, the couples seen here
are not staged, but were instead caught in their private sphere, with only slight
arrangements in pose and clothes. Similarly, the subsequent image manipulation
is itself merely cosmetic, and only vaguely suggestive in its approximate use
of banal style sheets. The images eventually appear less innocent than is evident
at first glance, allowing for streaks of reality to break through the cracks
of their apparently seemless kitschy surface.
The Love Artist was reviewed in the following
newspapers: Neuses Deutschland; Die Tageszeitung and Berliner Morgenpost.
