MARIANNE VIERØ
DUNK
15/04 – 20/05/2017
Opening: Sat 15/04 17-19h
With “Dunk” Marianne Vierø negotiates the potential of subjective gestures against stylized forms and predetermined detail as it plays out in the relationship between the digitized brush stroke and the physical brush. In this scenario the digital stroke has freed the physical brush from whatever constraints its functionality might have imposed on its shape, so that it now lends itself to reinterpretation. This position is inspired by the digitalization of more and more tasks traditionally anchored within the physical world. But rather than looking at this development with nostalgia Vierø draws parallels to language and accepts the shift as inevitable. Much like a word’s changing meaning over time.
To test the ties between the language of the digital stroke and that of the physical brush Vierø presents the various element of the show as a nonsensical rebus. Using pictograms and symbols to represent syllabic sound parts of a word, a rebus can be decoded through disregarding the concept behind the pictograms, so as to only focus on the sounds of their defining names. Like with traditional rebuses the various elements of the show subtract or add to the value of one another leaving the original meaning nullified while another emerges from the sum of all. But as an added facet to the game Vierø seems to question what the defining name would be in the first place.
A key element in this negotiation is a group of prints presented in custom made wood frames with inlaid details on the side of the frame profile. Made in an analogue color darkroom, and build up from multiple exposures on light sensitive paper, the prints combine projected Photoshop files of digitized brush strokes with traditional photogram techniques where objects are placed directly on the image surface. Whereas the color blending resulting from the multiple exposures closely mimic ink based printing techniques such as silkscreen printing, the workflow of the analogue darkroom alongside the digital brushstrokes shift the balance between material, method and form.
With the physical brushes Vierø proposes a group of absurd, idiosyncratic objects punctuated by visual markers analogous to the silhouetted shapes represented on the prints. Made from wood, natural fibers, twine, metals, plaster and acrylic glass the physical brushes configure somewhere between functional tools and ceremonial representations. Heavily textured and almost crude they paint out the materiality of their own language against the backdrop of the intangible digitized strokes.
Marianne Vierø (Copenhagen, DK) has been a resident artist at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam; Triangle Arts Association in NYC; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include “Coat Concave” at die Raum, Berlin (2017); “Glyph” at 427, Riga (2015); and “Great Transformantion” at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2014). She has participated in group shows at Future Gallery, Berlin; De Vleeshal, Middelburg; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and 1857, Oslo among others. In June Ellen de Bruijne Projects will present a solo of Marianne Vierø’s work at LISTE Basel.
