Work on Paper: Andriu Deplazes, Kubra Khademi, Yehudit Sasportas and Uwe Wittwer

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Rämistrasse

The central topics of the exhibition are memory, a politically troubled past, women's rights, the subconscious as well as the very personal. What all four positions have in common is the spontaneity with which the different subjects take shape by use of gouache, oil and watercolour or ink and charcoal. Thus, the work on paper, through its rapid, sweeping and less carefully elaborated execution, often allows a very intimate and sensitive insight into the artists' respective intentions.

 

 In his carefully selected group of new works on paper, Andriu Deplazes (*1993 in Zurich; lives and works in Marseille and Zurich) presents us with colourful compositions of infinite depth that reflect the same painterly maturity as his large-format works on canvas. While the landscapes in Bläuliche Weite (Bluish vastness) or Turtelnde Tauben (Cooing doves) draw us into the distance in terms of perspective, works such as Zwei Körper auf Kanapee (Two bodies on canapé) grant an ironic view of the intimate interior. The fluorescent hues and repeated axial symmetry play, as so often, with traditional styles, such as the parallelism and symbolism of a Ferdinand Hodler or the rebellious aesthetic of a Pierre Bonnard. The figurative portraits, oriented towards sensation rather than physicality, are reminiscent of Maria Lassnig's concept of body awareness and explore questions around identity and belonging. 

 

Since the beginning of her career, the highly political gouache drawings and performances by Kubra Khademi (*1989 in Afghanistan; lives and works in Paris) have been closely interwoven with her personal life story as an Afghan woman expelled from her homeland. Her fine, clear drawing style with powerful colors and gold applications is reminiscent of Persian miniature painting used to illustrate the religious myths of past centuries in ancient scriptures. Many of the stories told to the artist as a child serve today as a starting point for her re-appropriations of the patriarchal traditions of her country that she reinterprets in a feminist way. The exhibition presents Première ligne, a work in four parts and Khademi's largest gouache on paper to date, as well as several smaller drawings from the series Female Crimes that are thematically intertwined. Khademi's view of the woman's naked body, which takes on a floating, erotic dimension against the white background of the paper, is central. Defying all the rules of her culture, she shows the female figure in intimate, provocative poses and makes them appear at times strong, at times childlike, and at times fleeting. It is a redefinition of cultural norms with which Khademi empowers herself and all Afghan women.

 

Yehudit Sasportas (*1969 in Ashdod, Israel; lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv) chose for the exhibition ten drawings in charcoal on paper from her most recent series of works known as Adam-HAYA. As a group, they form an important chapter in Sasportas' ongoing Liquid Desert Project - a large-scale artistic venture whose central idea consists of the philosophical connection of real artworks with metaphysical dimensions and their interaction. For the Adam-Haya drawings, the artist installed a hidden field camera in the Negev desert in southern Israel, filming for 24h every day, capturing wild, shy animals such as jackals, hyenas, wild boars and wolves during their nocturnal migrations. The Hebrew title Adam-HAYA stands for the encounter between the human (Adam) and the animal (Haya), which is transferred to the paper by means of the charcoal drawing in a multi-layered communication process. Drawing without line enables the artist to represent the active, subconscious resonance field in which she is interested. It is a very poetic drawing of language and subconscious information that the act of charcoal drawing is able to convey. The soft, blurred contours represent the unspoken that the animals communicate and pass on as they secretly make their way through the desert.

 

Since the beginning of his career in the 1980s, watercolour has occupied an important place in the work of Uwe Wittwer (*1954 in Zurich; where he lives and works). The glazed, flowing application of paint - so characteristic for the watercolour technique - formally underlines the artist's profound interest in the fleetingness and fading of memory. Familiar subjects, such as the ruin, the devastated forest landscape, the deep red colour surface and written fragments from literary sources as well as from handwritten letters, refer to the central narratives in Wittwer's oeuvre: the history of war and the examination of troubled pasts. His watercolours are fragmentary glimpses of photographic originals that lead to an alternative pictorial reality through Wittwer's painting process and tie in with his great discourse on the question of the power and meaning of images. In this way, even burdensome settings are transformed into poetically appealing compositions that awaken an intangible longing within us.