Lorna Macintyre – ‘Midnight Scenes & Other Works’: 20 April – 2 June 2012
Marieta Chirulescu & David Korty: 20 April – 7 May 2012
Mary Mary is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with Marieta Chirulescu and David Korty, who will both present a new body of works on paper and paintings. Situated within the rooms of a Victorian tenement apartment in the Eastend of the city, the exhibition forms part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
Both Chirulescu and Korty look to their immediate material surroundings as the origins for their work with each focusing on and adopting the techniques of abstraction rather than investing in clearly delineated representation. In many ways each seek to present an abstracted reflection of their works’ origin and the tools and techniques used to produce them.
Each allude to a familiar, historical, everyday imagery and yet both eliminates most of the identifiable referents within it, raising questions of reproduction. The ‘subjects’ are of the real world, but our understanding of them is muted, transformed and reconstructed.
For Marieta Chirulescu, the subjects in her paintings and prints are often the reflections of the ‘mechanical unconscious’ of scanners and photocopiers, and include book covers, glass, photographic negatives, transparent papers and photographs. For this show Chirulescu presents a series of inkjet prints on paper and a group of gesso and inkjet prints on canvas, produced using advanced and varied techniques of reproduction.
Her making process is multifaceted and can include Chirulescu photocopying papers many times until the surface structure changes or scanning sheets of glass which sometimes bear traces of leftover paint, or have coloured paper beneath them. By copying the empty underside of the scanner lid, leaving the photocopier open or the scanner empty, or placing a glass plate on the photocopier, she produces images that show gradiations of surrounding space, or bits of dirt and dust. This raw material then undergoes further processing: layers become surfaces and irregularities (edges, folds, dust, dirt) become gestures.
By working in this way, Chirulescu excavates her original sources and presents them as studies of her workings, under/ over exposure, tonality and painterly renderings. The works are both reduced and multifacted at the same time, with a seeking to not create representations, but to chronicle the creative process itself. She explores the parameters of the image and highlights its contents, its frames, borders, reflections and layers.
David Korty’s practice examines everyday objects and experience, depicting them as both recognisable images and as a series of complex abstractions. Korty’s making process is central to the finished works, with the origin of much of the images being the artist’s photography of his surroundings (often of Los Angeles); that of the ordinary and commonplace.
These images are then transposed into reinterpreted compositions of line and colour, whose subject matter is markedly abstract in its rejection of volume and a clear perspective. Korty has described this as a flattening and mediation, with this becoming a process of remodelling the ephemera of the everyday, into pattern.
In recent work Korty has mainly shifted his concerns to that of the pages of books, the borders of photographs and specifically in the series of etchings shown here – the compositions of newspapers and their pages. In these pieces, the text of a newspaper appears as a pattern of triangles, circles and squares as opposed to letters and images, with Korty seeking to present an almost futuristic image of an increasingly archiac format. In parallel to this we can also find echoes of Dadist collage, Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus in the graphic linearity and minimal colour.
Through this geometric and interlocking presentation of line and shapes, the once informative and communicative newspaper is reduced to purely form and gesture, rendering content indecipherable, with Korty’s works oscillating between abstractions and identifiable subjects. Instead the pieces become a platform for abstraction, resulting in a sophisticated dialogue between the non-objective and the representational, a way of seeing the surrounding world and reinventing it.
Born in 1974, Marieta Chirulescu lives and works in Berlin. Solo shows include Kunstverein Nürnberg; Work from the Martin Collection, Neues Museum, Nürnberg; White Cube Bermondsey, London (all 2011); Kunsthalle Basel; Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin (both 2010). Group exhibitions include ‘Collaborations and Interventions,’ CCA Kunsthalle Andratx; ‘Made in Germany 2,’ Sprengel Museum, Hannover (both 2012); ‘Fade into you,’ Herald St, London; ‘Back to the Old House,’ Clifton Benevento, New York (both 2010).
Born in 1971, David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include China Art Objects, Los Angeles (2011); Kimmerich, New York; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin (all 2010). Group exhibitions include ‘On Forgery: Is One Thing Better Than Another?,’ LA><ART, Los Angeles (2011); ‘The Flower Show,’ China Art Objects, Los Angeles (2010).
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