L’étrangère presents the first UK solo exhibition of Katharina Marszewski, an installation which incorporates sculpture, screen printing and photography. Marszewski’s practice begins with an attempt to define her surrounding environment and her individual place amidst its flux.
This process-based approach to making subverts the mystical illusion of a singular artistic vision, and instead replaces it with the intense and repetitive action of observing, producing, re-thinking and overlapping of both image and text. Marszewski positions herself as an artist-strategist: a ‘correspondent of events-that-never-were’ who brings together and translates fragments from past, present and future times into a ‘contemporary’ reality within the gallery space.
The show’s title – All Eyez Inn – suggests an act of looking and an essential condition of being in the world. Throughout the exhibition a motif appears in different variations, all the time slipping from any finite field of vision. It is with this image of two women that the act of looking begins, as these figures also appear to be searching for something. Marszewski’s inflection of this visual motif with her self-titled colour palette – ‘dirty desert rosé’ and ‘mechanical bluish’ – suffuses these images with a heady atmosphere: the pinkish ‘magic hour’ of an L.A. sunset or the glossy metallic sheen of a sun-hit car bonnet. On the opposite wall a photographic work denotes the artist’s ‘visual shelter’: a semiotic lens upon the many actors within the artist’s choreographed stage.
Marszewski’s aesthetic and linguistic repertoire stems from her interest in the artist as both a strategist and a utopian businesswoman. This pseudo-bureaucracatic function is suggested by the sculpture in the back gallery: a series of heart-shaped metal plates connected by several coiled telephone wires. Both a prop in the artist’s ‘office’ and a potential centre of communication for the exhibition, the work refers to Marszewski’s use of language as a plastic and flexible material in the conflation of personal and administrative aesthetics.
It is these gaps in communication, the condition of being in-between two places, and the meanings that can arise from the repetitive act of speaking, writing, drawing, and printing, which positions the resultant artworks in a constant state of becoming. As the ‘all eyez’ of the title suggests, Marszewski enacts a radical transformation of our collective, lived experience and the plethora of signs, objects, images and dreams that filter through our modern day consciousness.
About the artist:
Katharina Marszewski (born 1980) lives and works in Berlin. She is a graduate of the Fine Art department at the College of Fine Arts, Braunschweig and is currently completing a PhD in Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin.
Marszewski has exhibited internationally. Solo and two-person exhibitions include: Part I, Galerie Warhus Ritterhaus, Cologne (with Gerda Scheepers) (2014); CV Ce La Vie, Exile, Berlin (2013); Porthos, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2012); Optik Boom, Galeria Stereo, Poznan (2012); Extended Version Print, Parkhaus Malkasten, Düsseldorf (2012); Squoters, Alex 4D, Berlin (with Thomas Rentmeister) (2011); Adorable Walker, Schaufenster Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2009).
Group exhibitions include: Kongress der Möglichkeiten, Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin (2015); What is social, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2015); Duties and Pleasures, Muzeum Wnętrz, Otwock Wielki (2014); Polish Art Today, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2014); On the golden wire for 34, Nurture Art, New York (2013).
Marszewski has been the recipient of several grants, including a Promos travel grant for research within Los Angeles (2015) and a grant from Mloda Polska, Polish Ministry of Culture (2013). She has also participated in numerous residency programmes, including Residency Unlimited, New York (2013), Residency at Kulturamt Düsseldorf (2012) and the A.I.R. Residency at Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2012).
Katharina Marszewski: All Eyez Inn – L’étrangère – until 23 January 2016.