JULIA OSCHATZ From the Closed World and the Infinite Universes
Thursday, April 10, 6 � 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through May 31, 2008
In our second one-person presentation of new works by Julia Oschatz, the artist depicts the ongoing odyssey of the Wesen, a hapless creature with an animal�s head and a human body who wanders through her paintings, drawings, and videos on a perpetual, existential, and ultimately fruitless, indefinable quest.
The exhibition will feature an installation of paintings on canvas and paper and two video pieces. In these newest works, Oschatz challenges the boundaries of imagination and empiricism.
In the series of paintings entitled Rebird, Oschatz situates the Wesen within landscapes that have been appropriated from the backgrounds of historically famous paintings, such as Leonardo�s Mona Lisa, Botticelli�s The Birth of Venus, and works by Cranach, Munch, Bosch, Goya, Vel�zquez, Poussin, among others, reinterpreting them as �a kind of filmset as seen from the eye of a bird.� These are the artist�s largest and most fully realized works on canvas to date, enacted in contrasting layers of thick impasto and thin veils of muted color. To each work, the artist has added a subtle three-dimensional object: e.g., a small shell in the corner of the Botticelli or a half-submerged boat in the Poussin.
Twenty-seven works on paper and canvas from the series Fiction Follows Forms are installed in a grid on a black wall. Here, as in the video pieces, the Wesen struggles against the laws of gravity in a kind of cosmic journey that transcends space and time, abstraction and representation.
Julia Oschatz lives and works in Berlin. Her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Julia Oschatz: Where Else, is on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, through July 6th.
