30 May - 9 August 2009

Germaine Kruip

Aesthetics as a Way of Survival

The solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Germaine Kruip (born 1970) will present new artworks especially created for the show. Upon entering the stage-like spaces—equipped with minimal means—Kruip makes the viewer the actual agent in her spatial interventions. She confronts the viewer with the question of the relationship between fiction and reality, authenticity and representation. Are we dealing with representations of reality or constructs, portrayals or inventions?

The subtitle Aesthetics as a Way of Survival is derived from the eponymous film that Kruip made earlier this year with Renske Janssen in North Eastern Australia and as such forms the thematic starting point of the exhibition. The film presents the male bowerbird building elaborately designed bowers—mock nests that are constructed according to purely aesthetic criteria and that are indeed reminiscent of artworks. In this way the birds also place fine, coloured touches using found materials. The bowers are supposed to attract the female bowerbird and form the centrepiece of a precisely choreographed courtship display. The male practices his patterns of movement around the bower in advance of the mating season—occasionally with the aid of another male bird, occasionally or so it would seem, for Kruip’s camera.

Her film about the bowerbird poses the question relating to the »artificial« and the »natural« in a surprisingly new way, encompassing the whole exhibition with this dichotomy. Guided by visual similarities Kruip establishes a number of connections in the exhibition between her different works. Some elements and colours one encounters in the film ‘return' in abstract forms somewhere else in the exhibition space. Two fragile objects Messing Ellipse and Gypsum Ellipse refer to essential shapes in the film and, as the titles suggest, material is as important as form.

The Sunlight Installation, which is installed on the rooftop, causes a subtle dance of light recreating the waving leaves from a tree and the shadows they cast. The installation's elusive quality-its changing visibility in the course of the day as well as its subtleness-clearly contrasts the solid presence of the marble in the first room. The impressive Marble Untitled, shows the flat polished surface of stone but with a drawing that reminds us of a detailed surrealistic painting as well as the natural structure of the mountain it came from. With a striking grain reminiscent of the ellipse-shaped bowers of the birds Marble Untitled steers us into unravelling the boundaries between appearance and being.

Germaine Kruip designed the insert for the 01/09 edition of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen’s magazine Béton Brut.

The exhibition is co-curated by Renske Janssen and will be accompanied by a catalogue publication.


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