Project #15: Suzanne Wild
24. May - 28. July 2024
DavisKlemmGallery Projektraum, Kirchstraße 4, 65239 Hochheim am Main
Project #15: Suzanne Wild
THE ARTIST
Suzanne Wild (*1960 London) studied at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and at the renowned Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has been a guest lecturer at various faculties in Europe. Her works are regularly shown in solo and group exhibitions in Europe. She lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Her early works focus on abstraction and nonrepresentational art. Through landscapes and interiors with impressionistic features, she came to objects such as shoes. However, light and naturalism have always played a major role in her work.
MATERIALS
Oil on canvas. The classic among paintings. Suzanne Wild's painting style is also classic, almost traditional. But here she does not show representative paintings in huge, room-filling formats. Instead, she shows small portraits that would even fit in a shoe closet. They could fill an entire room in their quantity. The fact that this is wonderfully possible is also thanks to the standardization of formats. She uses mainly three formats, thus making it possible to hang hundreds of works together. Like an archivist, she stores her collected models according to color and size.
PRODUCTION
Making art often starts differently than one would think. In Suzanne Wild's case the starting point is in second-hand stores, at the flea market or wherever she finds her models. These can also be other things: Women's underwear, children's skirts, gloves, wigs. What they all have in common is that they have a feminine connotation, that they caught Suzanne Wild's eye and that they tell a story. Whether true or not is irrelevant. It is those bright red pumps that turn a woman into a dancing queen on a Saturday night. They are pieces for special occasions, but also for everyday wear. Worn once - and then they gather dust in the wardrobe. Or a favorite pair that is worn every day. These are the kind of stories that can be read into her shoe portraits - shoes with visible character.
INFLUENCE
Velázquez! That's one of the answers Suzanne Wild promptly gives when asked which artists inspire her. And the answer is obvious as well. Diego Velázquez: The Spanish superstar of portrait painting in the 17th century. Naturalistic depictions and light play a major role in his work. He influenced artists from Goya to Picasso. The way Velázquez shows how light and shadows on the robes of the Spanish royal family can also be found in Suzanne Wild's works of women's shoes and children's sandals. The focus is also the same. Against a dark or monochrome background, the shoes are staged just as honorably as the king's daughter Margarita in Las Meninas - Velasquez's most famous work.
THE SPACE
The 20 m² room, in which pens and exercise books were previously sold, is now available to artists from the DavisKlemmGallery as a project space. Instead of regular but limited opening times, the room can be viewed around the clock: the entire room and thus the project can be viewed at all times thanks to the large window front. Changing projects, installations, works of art and artists can be discovered here. The current presentation will be on view until July 28th, 2024.
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Project #14: Gisela Winterling
01. March - 19. May 2024
DavisKlemmGallery Projektraum, Kirchstraße 4, 65239 Hochheim am Main
Project #14: Gisela Winterling
THE ARTIST
Gisela Winterling (1963) is a poet, but exhibiting in an art space is nothing unusual for her. She writes poems, short prose, experiments with various forms of literature and engages in inter-media encounters with visual and applied arts, music and performance. She is an ambassador for words, which she advocates in various ways, such as in writing manifestos and conceiving art actions ("Art needs bread rolls"), in designing poetic room and sound installations and in the sense of "poetry to go", the continual search for places, ways and collaborations that bring poetry to life. After studying German philology and literature and general and comparative literature in Vienna and Taiwan, among other places, her path led her back to Wiesbaden, more precisely Mainz-Kostheim, where she co-founded the Zündholz.Werkstätten in 2013 and regularly exhibits there with artists from other disciplines.
MATERIALS
Winterling's advertising slogans for poetry come in various forms. Her Instagram posts have become posters, postcards, stickers and T-shirts. The artist always focuses on the interaction of language, design and medium.
Poster font: "Franklin Gothic", a sans serif font with a clear and substantial appearance, designed in the United States in 1904. It is still widely used today by large companies as an advertising font. In the USA, it is the house font of the Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 1969, it was the original font for the "WAR IS OVER" peace campaign by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Paper in A1 format: Affiche paper, suitable for outdoor advertising.
Poster sign: Spruce roof battens, HDF boards.
PRODUCTION
For Gisela Winterling, ideas and content are closely linked to the creation and exploration of hybrid forms and formats of presentation, which constantly gives rise to new approaches and implementations. For this installation, the rhetoric and rhythm of advertising slogans and the aggressive election advertising on roadside billboards were the impetus for poetic action. Winterling changes the slogans for consumer products in order to advertise for something else - poems. For her, poetry has great potential and a transformative power. She transforms and create slogans that develop both linguistic wit and depth. Colors, fonts and formats are chosen and commissioned to match. She built the poster signs and mounted the posters herself.
INFLUENCE
Aphorisms had a formative influence on Winterling. An aphorism is a literary device, which in its brevity, deliberate one-sidedness and use of humor invites a change of perspective and critical thinking. "Brevity of language gives breadth of thought", said Jean Paul. Brevity is a central criterion in the language of advertising, which surrounds us everywhere on every conceivable channel - for products, services and political parties. Even the attention given to a single message out of hundreds is brief. Winterling plays with this idea: Her installation imitates the simultaneity of messages. However, the advertised product is a new - irritating, amusing and inspiring - element: poetry.
INSTALLATION
Chairs and poster signs of different heights are installed together in the middle of the room to form a barricade that forces people to stand still. The chairs support the posters, the posters support each other. Each poster has a different slogan, which it proclaims to the world in bold white letters on a brightly colored background. At first glance, we see a mess. Then individual slogans crystallize. Our gaze lingers on one and then wanders to the next. As there is no strict order, there is also no order as to how and in which order the posters are read. They find their own order. Everyone finds a different signal word, a different color that leads the gaze further. This is exactly how Gisela Winterling imagined her installation to be: she does not direct, rather she makes an open offer and promotes or demonstrates the power of the poetic word and intervention through poetry.
THE SPACE
The 20 m² room, in which pens and exercise books were previously sold, is now available to artists from the DavisKlemmGallery as a project space. Instead of regular but limited opening times, the room can be viewed around the clock: the entire room and thus the project can be viewed at all times thanks to the large window front. Changing projects, installations, works of art and artists can be discovered here. The current presentation will be on view until May 5th, 2024.
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