English
Deutsch
until 12.10. | #4363ARTatBerlin | Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin shows from 13. September 2024 the exhibition “Passenger” by the artist Luella Bartley.
Luella Bartley’s solo exhibition at Galerie Kristin Hjellegjerde in Berlin presents a new body of work created through the artist’s visits to Royal Ballet dance rehearsals with choreographer Wayne McGregor. The resulting works explore the balance between effort and elegance, vulnerability and strength that Bartley observed in the dance studio, while also marking an important shift in her own practice. While her earlier works explored the complex feelings of vulnerability and exposure of the female body, the more recent works capture a powerful kind of physicality that is not only androgynous, but also expansive, fluid and dynamic.
As Bartley watched the rehearsals, she was mesmerised by the beauty and flow of the dancers’ movements as well as the energy, intensity and stamina demanded of their bodies. “This idea of fragility and strength, of the effort required to create something that seems so effortless, struck me as a metaphor for the friction between how we deal with things internally and how we appear externally, how we can accommodate, express and experience all these different, seemingly contradictory feelings in a single moment of truth,” she says. She took photos and sketches in the dance studio and then returned to her own studio to work on the images further before drawing directly onto the canvas with coloured pencils, creating hard, clear lines that contrast with watery, translucent layers of oil paint. This visual juxtaposition is perhaps most evident in the painting in which the dancing person squats on her heels and presses her palms to the floor in front of her.
Although Bartley worked as a fashion designer for many years before she started painting a few years ago, this is the first time her figures appear clothed. “As a designer, I used to think about conveying stories and illusions, whereas my new work is about the pure feeling of the body and the organic sensuality of clothing,” she says. She paints the clothes as the dancers wore them during training, fascinated by how the fabric moved with and on their bodies, how it folded, creased and clung to their sweat. The clothing in the paintings captures a sense of movement, space and time. We see in the dirty, stained soles of the dancers’ white socks the movement that preceded them, the places where their bodies pressed into the floor. Bartley was also impressed by the neutrality of the bodies in the rehearsal room, which had less to do with individual identity and more to do with the collective, less with sexuality or gender and more with movement and energy.
In one work, a single figure appears three times, as if in a long exposure, tumbling through space. Its limbs seem to interlock and bump into each other, but within this tense, struggling movement there are also moments of relaxation and tenderness. The idea of being carried, pushed and pulled by an abstract force is also taken up by the title of the exhibition “Passenger”, an allusion to the Iggy Pop song of the same name, and at the same time it is also about a journey: letting go and trusting in movement and the physical state of one’s own body.
Opening: Thursday, 12. September 2024, 6:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 13. September – Saturday, 12. October 2024
Title image caption: Luella Bartley, Impulsion, 2024 | Öl und Bleistift auf Leinwand, 95 x 140 cm
Exhibition Passenger – Kristin Hjellegjerde Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
