TIME LOCK (Zoom In)

Melissa Gordon, Judith Kakon, Katja Mater,

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Ilona Stutz

09 April – 21 May 2022

“Description”

TIME LOCK (Zoom In) is an exhibition focusing on models and all their possible definitions. Anonymous models that populate both painting studios and the pictorial canon; models parading around wearing or supporting the creations of others. Models allowing a reproduction, serving as a reference, acting a prototype for multiplication, determining genre, style, or schematic representations of process. Whether they evoke a person cited, invoke an example or inspiration, whether they are life-size, reduced, enlarged, preparatory or final.

Some of these notions are deployed on a silk-screened wallpaper by Melissa Gordon, a grid background that evokes either a map-like division of flat space or fence-like division of spatial dimensions, or simply the cutting mat in the studio used to cut, assemble, and glue the fragments.

Sizes and scales vary and confront each other throughout the exhibition: time unfolds inside a camera to compose the photographic clocks of Katja Mater, and the space is periodically fenced off by the gridded corsets of Judith Kakon, scattered throughout the space. Gordon’s large-format Female Readymade paintings present screens and holes through imaginative spaces of painterly gestures in conversation with real objects and correspondences. Annaik Pitteloud’s Nutshell Studies of Viewed Spaces are both models referring to the White Cube and to puppet houses: as minimal wooden forms they oscillate between structural gestures and imaginary models. Ilona Stutz’s three identical sculptures are parked in the space, games arrested in time.

TIME LOCK (Zoom in) gathers a set of works that in turn compose a model, which draw references from both the history of art and from a domestic universe as overused as it is inexhaustible. A small house with a wallpaper berefts of floral forms, and if the garden is fenced, it contains a studio where one smokes and on the wall the clock ticks off the time to come.

MELISSA GORDON is an American and British painter, writer and editor living in Brussels. Her practice investigates histories and behaviors of gesture. Recent exhibitions include: Liquid Gestures, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, UK, Resistances, Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam, Iris, The Large Glass, London, The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, BE, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, GARAGE; Rotterdam, and The Mechanics of Fluids, Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC. She has exhibited widely including Vleeshal, Middelburg, WIELS Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Spike Island, Bristol, UK, Kunsthal Oslo, NO, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, amongst others. Her writing is included in Painting: Funny Peculiar with Slimvolume, and essays in Texte zur Kunst, and May Revue. She is the Professor of Painting at Oslo Art Academy.

JUDITH KAKON currently lives and works in Basel. Her work encompasses sculpture, installation, image-making as well as the use of text sources, frequently borrowed from transnational English. The exhibition as medium plays an intrinsic role in her way of working, occasionally this also results in curatorial and collaborative work. She is the winner of the Manor Art Prize Schaffhausen 2021, which was accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffausen. Other recent exhibitions were hosted by venues such as Kunsthalle Basel, Coalmine, Winterthur; Ventilator, Tel Aviv; SALTS, Birsfelden; Anorak at the project space of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Kunsthaus Langenthal; Studioli, Rome andKunsthaus Glarus. She received her Master in Fina Arts from Bard MFA, New York and her Bachelor degree from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

KATJA MATER is a visual artist living in Brussels. Her practice focuses on the parameters of photography and film from a meta-perspective, using them as non-transparent media. Recent exhibitions include Museum M The Constant Glitch, A.I.R. Biennial, New York, Bye-Bye His-Story, at Centre de la Gravure. She has exhibited at the Rotterdam Film festival, KIOSK, Ghent, Maison Van Doesburghuis (residency), the Beurschowburg and Mara Hertfordand recently at LambdaLambdaLambda in Brussels.

ANNAÏK LOU PITTELOUD is a Swiss artist living in Brussels. Her work makes use of different media to direct the viewer’s attention to the invisible components of image-construction, the museum space and the creative process itself. Pitteloud’s pared-down vocabulary raises critical questions to do with social issues, while challenging the art world’s mechanisms and its codes of perception, transmission and presentation. Her work has been presented amongst others in: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, CH; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, LV; Museo cantonale d’Arte Lugano, CH; Kunsthalle Bern, CH; Witte de With Rotterdam, NL; Riga Biennal (2018), Moscow Biennal, RU; Shanghai Biennal CN. She has been rewarded with different awards: Prix culturel Manor Vaud (2016), ZBK Kunstpreis (2012), Prix culturel Vaudois (2008), Swiss Art Awards (2006 and 2007). Pitteloud teaches at Bern University of the Arts (BUA) and is a member of the board of Kunsthalle Bern.

ILONA STUTZ is a Swiss artist living in Bern and Zurich. She is concerned with the relationship between individuals and the structures they inhabit, which in turn are inherent to them. To make such relationships visible and tangible in space, she works with different media, text and language. She is a part of the duo {F_x Office} and a co-founder of the art space unanimous consent Zurich, which she co-directed in its first year. Recent exhibitions include There’s Always Tomorrow, MFA ZHdK degree show (curated by Gianni Jetzer 2021), Galleria di Berna, Stadtgalerie Bern (2021), compro oro, Ballostar Mobile Bern ({F_x Office}, 2020), Due to Circumstance, Hamlet Zurich x Picto-Topic Geneva (2020/2021), True Grid and true grid irl, unanimous consent Zurich (curatorial 2020), {F_x Office}:cubicles.dump, Kulturfolger Zurich (2020).
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