Charlotte Posenke
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Charlotte Posenke
Work from her exhibition at Melas Papadopoulos, Athens.
“Deschenes and Posenenske, separated by time and geography, recast questions of form, production, distribution, ontology, consumption, seeing and displaying. In this constellation, reversals are operating as points of intersection: uniqueness vs unlimited reproduction, materiality vs technologically produced objects referencing consumer goods, fragility vs sturdiness. The conversation hits moments of smooth union in the exploration of the possibilities of abstraction, the creation of space both inside and outside the work, the continuous engagement with the specific medium (photography and sculpture respectively), while ever expanding beyond them.
Charlotte Posenenske, one of the few artists in Germany to work within Minimalism in the 1960s, produced sculptural pictures, mostly monochrome surfaces made of steel and aluminum, sprayed with weatherproof RAL standard colours. Her critique of commercialism and her re-interpretation of the role of the artist still resonate as radical. The industrially produced Reliefs are conceived as multi-panel arrangements that can be re-configured in endless combinations and positions: on the floor, on walls, high, low, indoors, preferably outdoors, in non-art contexts. Posenenske restricts the display of the parts only slightly by stipulating 3 conditions, adding effervescence to their playful modularity.
Liz Deschenes’ self-referential pictures are systematic and poetic explorations of the language and mechanics of photography. Instead of locking time in permanent forms, her camera-less images take this medium’s principal connection to the real, to its elemental components. Exposing black and white photo sensitive paper to the night sky, or color paper to intense daylight she produces semi-reflective fields, often with mirror-like properties. Liz Deschenes responds to Posenenske’s yellow, red and blue, convexely folded, concavely canted Reliefs with a series of silver corner pieces and grey graphite rectangular corners suspended from the gallery walls. The photograms bracket the works around them, mirroring them via Deschenes’ decision to reference the standardized dimensions of Posenenske’s aluminum works. The new matte photograms, produced for this exhibition at H 100 cm and W 50 cm correspond directly to the Reliefs– a double-take, not quite a mirror image, but close, another fold in her reflection on the art object becoming the actual embodiment of its “subject-matter”.” – Melas Papadopoulas