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until 04.06. | #3441ARTatBerlin | Galerie Martin Mertens presents from 26. April 2022 the exhibition “Die dritte Hälfte” by the artist Joanna Buchowska.
Berlin-based artist Joanna Buchowska is a master of paper collage. She draws from a huge archive of magazines from different decades and with very different content. The spectrum ranges from home and furnishing magazines to fashion magazines to National Geographic or architecture magazines.
In a very unusual technique, she sometimes assembles entire building parts to create new buildings or uses elements in a completely different context, so that a room ceiling can become steps or green ladies’ pumps appear at first glance as moss or lichen on a tree trunk. Black and white photos from the 50s or 60s can stand harmoniously next to photos from the 90s in one work and together form an exciting alien-like scenery.
Her works have a high painterly quality. They almost seem like painting with paper and sometimes the paper scraps are directly complemented by small painterly interventions or the painting acts as a connecting element between different collaged photos. The paper scraps are glued to a canvas so that they take on a more solid object character than a framed paper collage could.
Joanna Buchowska, “Vera Rubin”, 60 x 50 cm, Paper and acrylic on canvas, 2022
In Galerie Martin Mertens’ first solo exhibition with Joanna Buchowska, she is primarily showing a new series of works dealing with little-known female scientists.
Joanna says: “Worldwide, the proportion of women in science (2016) is 29.3 percent, in southern and western Asia it is only 18.5 percent. Within the EU, Germany is at exactly 28 per cent, only just ahead of the Netherlands, which brings up the rear. This is shockingly low and I would like to give female scientists a face.
I have developed a picture cycle that deals with the person of the female scientist as such (portrait, family portrait, etc.) and ultimately with the invention itself – from Hildegard von Bingen (1098*) to Margaret Hamilton (1936*). A picture of the same size is dedicated to each female inventor. The craft part of the realisation was preceded by intensive research work. Even if I have allowed myself a certain amount of freedom in the pictorial elaboration, this specific project is not about fictitious biographies.
biographies. After my projects “crime stories” from 2018 and the “murder mountains” from 2019 as well as “Elephant Man- John Merrick” from 2020, which are all based on real stories, I would like to continue to follow the thread of fact, but still always leave myself the space for a certain fiction or extension of reality.
Vera Rubin: Because of her groundbreaking scientific research results and her fight against sexism in her own field, she was and still is a role model for young female astronomers. Some even claim that she deserved the Nobel Prize in Physics for the observations on dark matter.
Exhibition dates: Tuesday, 26. April to Saturday, 4. June 2022
Special opening for the Gallery Weekend: Friday, 29. and Saturday, 30. April 2022 – 1:00 to 9:00 pm; Sonntag, 1. Mai 2022 – 11:00 am to 7:00 pm
To the Gallery
Exhibition Joanna Buchowska – Galerie Martin Mertens | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
