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Indepth Arts News:
"Arngunnur Yr: Heimat & Nadja Poppe: Land"
2011-05-06 until 2011-06-25
Cain Schulte Gallery Berlin
Berlin, ,
DE Germany
Heimat, new oil paintings by Icelandic artist Arngunnur Yr, and Land, new drawings by the young Dresden artist Nadja Poppe make up this exhibition. Yr's artworks, mostly oil on wood or aluminum panel, are classical landscape paintings in the sense that they consist of traditional surfaces familiar to us. In combination with soft and mellow colors, these landscapes seem inviting, poetic and seductive to their viewers. Yr is very aware of this effect and uses it to push the limits of her extraordinary painting technique further to manipulate what is seemingly perfect.
The landscapes are built of multiple layers of oil paint, which she attacks afterwards, removing and adding them. Within this process, she consciously leaves space for coincidence and lack of control, therefore for emotions.
Argnunnur Yr was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1962. She studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavik and at Gerrit Rietveldt Akademie, Amsterdam. The artist graduated with a BFA in painting at San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA at Mills College, Oakland. Since 1985 her art has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions as well as public collections across Europe and the USA.
We experience a moment in nature in Nadja Poppe's unsentimental, but atmospheric drawings. The landscapes seem to be a memory, or an imaginative, unspecific place in nature, timeless. Here, independent from seasons and weather, Poppe searches for her counterpart and explores its abundance and also emptiness. She finds the empty, clear spaces by adding and removing or erasing -- and as an element, as important as the black and gray tones. The eraser is a key tool in Poppe's works, important for finding the pictorial composition and here, the artist masters a wonderful balance in adding and removing.
Nadja Poppe was born in Großenhain in 1983. She studied Fine Art at the HfBK Dresden and is master student with Prof. Elke Hopfe since 2010.
IMAGE BY: Arngunnur Yr, Eystrahorn, 2011, oil on aluminum pannel.
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