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until 18.04. | #2707ARTatBerlin | Contemporary Fine Arts shows from 7th March 2020 the exhibition Space Lips with sculptures and collages by the artist Katja Strunz.
The presence of the past is Katja Strunz’s subject, the fold is her method, metal and paper her material. The work is about getting from A to B—what it means, why we care—and in this way, about the relationship between space and time. The daunting continuum!
The traumatized body folds time. Traumatic experiences are not processed like memories, instead they get stuck, stored in the body. In psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, he describes how trauma “comprises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive,” revealing the physical dimension to the continuous reliving of the past that mires people with PTSD. In the present, survivors experience their traumas as fragmented images, sounds and emotions that the brain can’t register as belonging to the past.
In angular flaps and folds, Strunz renders ruptures and intrusions. Metal fans into delicate shapes in neutral tones. Pages of old books find new form, spliced and overlapping. Suspended, sharp angles assume a softness. If life isn’t linear, the present hardly present, is this what it looks like?
The train folded time too, collapsing distances like accordion bellows. In an 1841 newspaper column, Heinrich Heine ventured, “Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone.” Compressing space increases time. The train careening through 19th century towns laden with symbolism, and the planes and rockets that captured the 20th century imagination, find no visual equivalent today. It is the invisibility of data farms or undersea cables, not their image, that captures our age of acceleration. Strunz’s folds abstract these paradigm shifts. The sculptures give shape to the way progress simultaneously contracts and expands perspective. It’s about how time is money, a need for speed, but there’s also a tempering. Like a big zoom out. A recalibration. Wherever you go, there you are.
n Katja Strunz’s fifth solo exhibition with CFA Berlin, the artist shows smaller sculptures for the first time. What is new about these metal folds are their partly coloured frames. They are accompanied by new “Pulp Paintings”, large-format two-dimensional folds or collages made of scooped paper and laminated onto canvas, which have been part of the canon of Strunz’s oeuvre for several years.
Katja Strunz (*1970) studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. The artist has had institutional solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, USA (2019), the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2013), the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken (2010), the Camden Art Center, London (2009) and Haus Esters Haus Lange in Krefeld (2006), among others. She has participated in exhibitions at the Goetz Collection in Munich (2013, 2015 and 2018/19), the Migros Museum, Zurich (2013), the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2012), Mumok in Vienna (2010), at the 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, USA (2008), the Boros Collection, Berlin (2008), the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (2006), Kunsthalle Basel (2003) and many others.
The artist lives and works in Berlin.
Vernissage: Friday, 6th March 2020, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 7th March – Saturday, 18th April 2020
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Image caption: Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts + Katja Strunz
Exhibition Katja Strunz – CFA Berlin | Galerieführer Berlin | Contemporary Art Guide | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
