Anna Virnich
Stills
10 SEPTEMBER – 5 NOVEMBER 2022
Robert Grunenberg is pleased to present “Stills”, an exhibition with new, large-scale works by Anna Virnich. The artist is known for her delicate tableaus composed of different textiles. Starting from abstract painting, Virnich creates an emotionally charged pictorial space by using contrasting materialities and different textures.
Solo Exhibition:
Anna Virnich
Stills
Robert Grunenberg
10.09.2022 – 05.11.2022
The variety of materials, sometimes sharp and contrasting, sometimes overlapping and complementing, ranges from silk to polyester, from leather to faux fur and latex, to shiny sequins and faded cotton. Floral ornaments are combined with yellowed foxing, and ruffled taffeta billows are placed next to wrinkled, stiff plastic. Not only do the materials themselves evoke certain associations and memories, but they arise precisely in their specific combination with each other.
Whereas Virnich has so far drawn on her growing fund of textiles from a wide variety of sources, painterly elements now appear for the first time, applied by the artist with oil pastels onto the textiles. All of a sudden, the already existing patterns and motifs on the fabrics are interacting with the expressive, impasto paintings from the artist’s hand. Like the remnants of a dream that still presses against the head long after one has woken up, the paintings press against the stretched fabrics. As if the artist had traced the brain shortly after waking up, capturing a fading image. Sometimes the painting expands on the surface in clear shapes, like the delicate drawing of yellow lemons on a light background, sometimes a single tendril of flowers appears, seemingly isolated behind a layer of green, transparent plastic.
Virnich, too, is not primarily concerned with the materials and their history, but with the pictorial quality that underlies every single fabric. With somnambulistic certainty, Virnich composes different textures with one another and gradually arranges the individual bodies of color into a picture in which the elements are fluidly interacting. Opaque, rectangular fragments form anchor points and function as windows into an external reality that merges with memories. The individual forms are connected through visible, handset seams that run through the works like scars, making the dynamic process of their creation visible. Like film stills from an inner catalog of life that feed from consumed images and own memories, the works seem to be embedded in a before and an after.
The artist’s almost sculptural approach of letting herself be intuitively guided by the physical qualities of the textures also incorporates the in-between and behind of the stretched fabrics. Similar to a diorama, where spatial depth is created through multiple layers, there are also pictorial spaces emerging here.
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com