Sveta Shuvaeva

DRAW-S

Sveta Shuvaeva – The Art of Subtle Deception

At first glance, Svetlana’s art is charming, sweet, almost harmlessly endearing and yet her works are layered, biting, serious.

You fall into the artist’s trap happily and often, to name two examples: In a textile manufacture pretty fabrics were created based on patterns by the artist, which were made into similarly ordinary-looking dresses; only when looking closer the patterns reveal themselves to be vulgar swear words.

Another time you entered an empty room that had never found a use and wanted to move on right away, it was empty, but full of art, an electrical outlet here and there, one of many ventilation grilles, an entire door, everything made of paper, so precisely done that you almost did not notice.

In a variety of ways, therefore, the artist brings up relevant issues like violence against women, equality, a lack of substance, architecture devoid of purpose.

And the same is true for the artist’s drawings. These, too, you have to give a close look in order to decipher them, they are not sweet just like the room is not empty and the textile is not pretty.

With her delicate aesthetic, Svetlana Shuvaeva succeeds in breaking free from the Soviet and post-Soviet stylistic language and developing her own idiom, which speaks to a very specific aspect of Russian artistic reality.

Contemporary art is gaining ground, is becoming more and more of a part of public life and a broad discourse, but also the subject of focused cultural politics that attempt to capture the phenomenon of contemporary art.

This is expressed in a certain belittling tendency that stipulates that contemporary art should be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, if possible also abstract and conceptual or hard to comprehend, but not aggressive.

These politics encounter a young, developing market, which – not always, but very often – moves in the same direction, which is, in the end, the decorative, the beautiful, and the non-committal.

The work of Svetlana Shuvaeva in very subtle ways plays with this desire for harmony between politics and customer. It looks sweet, and it is the opposite. Delicately and sharply, Svetlana Shuvaeva raises relevant issues with her art.

Svetlana Shuvaeva, born 1986 in Bugulma/Tartastan, received a degree in design from the Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in 2010 and moved to Moscow in the same year, where she lives and works.

Text: Simon Mraz, curator of numerous Russian-international art projects, director of he Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow since 2009 (Translation: Monika Dittrich)

Aldo Giannotti

Building Buildings

Aldo Giannotti’s exhibition in the gallery WOP presents works that are about architecture in the widest sense. Familiar architectural concepts are led ad absurdum and turned on their head. Most of the drawings shown come from the context of the project Buildings on Buildings (KÖR 2016-2017) and point to Giannotti’s current project Demolition. The exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into Giannotti’s particular use of the drawing as an instrument of idea creation.

Italo Calvino posited that “the artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realising”. Concordantly, Giannotti’s creations are less about the work of art than about the influence and the effects of an idea – or better yet: about the potency and reality of possibilities. The medium of the drawing helps Giannotti ‘undress’ an idea, and therefore achieve its most pointed formulation, which can take on the form of a short statement or an unsolved question, a witty remark or a disarming joke. This strategy allows the artist to address a broad spectrum of complex issues without ever becoming patronising or pretentious.

Giannotti’s focus is on the relationship of human beings with their environment as well as the physical and symbolic infrastructure of the social space. His drawings often serve as instructions to explore concepts of social sculpture and call for their execution. They define the scope of performative actions which both the artist and his audience are a part of. Potential concepts are embedded in the rough surface of the real and tested for their resilience. In doing so, Giannotti’s drawings always seek to be put into practice and therefore become reality without giving up their potentiality. They remain sketches, drafts of reality. In the transition of the graphic visualisation of an idea to its performative execution the rules that make up the architecture of the social space become perceptible in their contingency and changeability. The representation of real possibilities can therefore make room for the presentation of new, possible realities.

Dr. Giorgio Palma

(Translation: Mag. Monika Dittrich)

David Eisl

Mountains of Madness

The works of David Eisl (* 1985), by using the motif of the checkerboard pattern, revealed by him as a structure charged with symbolism, open up wide associational fields. These range from questions of the measurability of the world to the manipulation of the image space on the part of central perspective or digital media to the accompanying construction of perception. Accordingly, the game of chess to him is never just a formal creative element. In a wider sense it is even the basis of his artistic method. In the production of his works, the artist often enters a game with himself and lets his works emerge in compliance with a self-imposed set of rules. Always connected with the ludic moment of his works is the wish to irritate and break orders of perception in order to reveal their relative nature. Accordingly, what is most interesting to Eisl about the game as motif and method is, quoting the artist, “playing with perception itself”.

Exhibition text: Playing chess with perception

Alfred Hrdlicka

Alfred Hrdlicka is one of the most important Austrian sculptors and graphic artists of the 20^th century. He created not only monumental sculptures, but also a great number of drawings and graphic works. Among these is the series The French Revolution, which was shown between 1985 and 1989 at Galerie Hilger. In his work, Hrdlicka dealt with questions of violence, power and helplessness. His artworks exposed the dark sides of human beings and their histories. His art was never only a comment on society, but always political. In formidable ways he addressed subjects like oppression, war, nationalism and violence, and often laid bare the deep abysses of human behaviour and their oftentimes tragic backgrounds. His entire life, Hrdlicka remained true to his expressive-figurative style.

Alfred Hrdlicka was born in 1928 in Vienna and died in his hometown in 2009. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Fritz Wotruba and together with Herbert Boeckl represented Austria at the 32^th Biennale di Venezia in 1964. After many years spent as an educator in Stuttgart, Hamburg and Berlin, Hrdlicka was appointed to the post of professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1988 his Monument against War and Fascism was built on Albertinaplatz. His works have been displayed in numerous national and international museums and galleries, among them the Vienna Secession; the Belvedere, Vienna; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Künstlerhaus, Vienna; and the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck.

Kandis Williams

Kandis Williams produces large scale collages that draw both from her personal experiences as well as from the interaction with the audience. She explores questions regarding her own identity and history and wider ranging topics such as racism, nationalism and violence. Her work is often held in black and white, using gradients to suggest space and depth. In a sensitive manner, she shows the closeness between beauty and ugliness, which can often only be seen at second glance. She densifies the content in her work, making the violence and horror seem more abstract. With the use of repetitive forms in her collages she brings structure to these complex issues, thereby showing their essence. Additionally, her work comprises performances and choreographies which encompass topics such as race, identity and the movement of the human body.

Kandis Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1985 and graduated from Cooper Union School of Art, New York. She lives and works between Berlin and Los Angeles. Her work has been shown recently in solo exhibitions at Night Galley, Los Angeles and SADE, Los Angeles, as well as in a performance at Kevin Space, Vienna. Kandis Williams participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles; Neu West, Berlin; 68 Projects, Berlin and The Breeder, Athens.

Kandis Williams CV