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until 21.07. | #3923ARTatBerlin | BBA Gallery presents from Friday 19. May 2023 the solo exhibition Beyond Solitude of the artist Giulietta Coates.
Giulietta Coates, La Guérison (Text) #1 .jpg, © Giulietta Coates
‘Beyond Solitude’, a solo exhibition by Giulietta Coates at BBA Gallery in Berlin, presents a body of work by the artist that spans the last four years. Her monochrome photographs of grandiose landscapes taken in Haute Provence, France express a longing for nature, its beauty that remains elusive and distant, and the impossibility of capturing it completely. Individual motifs – rocks, a pool of water, a wooden stump-are allegories for wider narratives of loss and beauty, dread and longing. Photographic images are then intimate conversations with the artist’s immediate surroundings. With a distinctive style and presentation, these poetic images speak of our relationship to the ‘otherness’ of the natural world and a consciousness outside of our own. The expansive mountainous landscapes of Haute Provence where absolute solitude resounds, inform the works in the exhibition. Photography as a medium – not by design, but rather by practicality – is how the artist overcomes the gulf between herself and the otherness of beauty that surrounds her.
Giulietta Coates, Impasse de Fauvery #5.jpg, © Giulietta Coates
The exhibition is one of longing and loss, felt since early childhood, for what is unreachable and for things to be otherwise. At the heart of her work is the distant beauty of nature: its painful otherness, its solitude. The artist is drawn to humble details of the landscape that make visible what is non-apparent, being and non-being.
With a Masters in printmaking from the RCA and a tradition of working with drawing and handling materials, her photographs have qualities of line, tone and marks that resemble drawings and prints. This gap between the vivid immediacy of what is hand-drawn versus the smooth remoteness of photographic images further expresses a nostalgia for the unreachable natural world.
The photographs and their construction is deliberately disorienting. Mounted on the outermost surface of deeply angled wooden frames, fragments of the natural world appear at odd angles. Longing is mapped into the rich, layered imagery whose perceptual puzzle engenders multiple levels of experience. Coates expresses the elusive beauty of nature; looking into the works, the viewer feels that we cannot encapsulate nature. Devoid of human presence, these works are subtle meditations on our relationship with the natural world and ourselves. They stand for the longing of what is unreachable and for things to be different.
Giulietta Coates, studio 1.jpg, © BBA Gallery
About the person :
Giulietta Coates was born in England in 1959. For the past 15 years, she has been working in a remote region of Haute Provence in the south of France, where remoteness has shifted her practice away from relief printing towards photography, as an accessible means of creation in an isolated region. The trips across Europe to the Swiss Alps that the artist undertook as a child and young adult with her Swiss mother have had a lasting impact on her visual aesthetic, as has her Printmaking MA at the RCA. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions across Europe, and her works are in collections around the world, including woodcuts, drawings and paintings, some of which date back 40 years. Since 2016, Coates has been represented by BBA Gallery in Berlin, Mitte.
Opening: Friday, 19. May from 6pm until 9pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 19. May until Friday, 21. July 2023
Artist talk: Sunday, 21. May 2023, from 4pm
To the Gallery
Image caption: Giulietta Coates, Impasse du Lac #4.jpg, © Giulietta Coates
Exhibition Giulietta Coates – BBA Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
