Brishty Alam

MIART, Milan

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EXILE returns to MIART with a presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942, Gwenn Thomas, born 1943, Brishty Alam, born 1988, and David Gruber born 1989.

In her move from painting to early string construction work, Kazuko Miyamoto replaced the confined space of the canvas for the architectural  expanse of her studio wall at 117 Hester Street. This move transformed the inconspicuous brick from a motif, as in the painting Progression of Rectangles (1969), into a site of measurement, structure, and spatial intervention. The visual field, in its immediacy and transparency, harbours a complexity that tends to spill from under its allocated borders or limits. The presentation expands on this very quality.

David Gruber’s paintings oscillate between the tactile immediacy of the microphone and the abstract detachment of material landscapes, employing pigment and composition to effect a kind of alchemical transmutation—rendering the familiar intangible.

A similar convergence of media occurs in the photographic practice of Gwenn Thomas, where the chemical processes intrinsic to photography extend the perceptual capacities traditionally associated with painting.

Whereas Brishty Alam furthers this trajectory through sculpture, translating the painterly surface into synthetic polystyrene forms that assert a presence at once corporeal and otherworldly. In each case, the painterly fails to remain a fixed category and is treated as a mutable field—expanded, translated, and reconfigured across material, spatial, and conceptual registers.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Gwenn Thomas

→Brishty Alam

→David Gruber

Solid Mesh

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Solid Mesh explores the cold, innate qualities of everyday reality, challenging the feeling of powerlessness when facing structures and currents far beyond the scale of the individuals who encounter them. Mesh is innately solid, yet by exaggerating or dramatising its inherent qualities, a whole new world unfurls – one filled with material becomings and planetary complicities.

Has the world stopped, or have we just learned to move along its axes?

With his Performance series, David Gruber approaches the image as a space of active engagement, aligning the paintings in visual choreographies where the depicted subject matter – the textured surfaces of microphone mesh – becomes a surprising point of symbolic contention. The microphones function both as symbolic figures and material environments. They are embedded into abstract landscapes or create their own and, as such, bridge the phantasmagorical dimensions of performance and spectacle with the intense interiority of matter itself. Performance, in this sense, is not about the familiar and resonant but of the eschewed and otherworldly – the unimagined or rarely seen.

The paintings in the show, more than endpoints of creative endeavour or aesthetic experience, present scenes or stages for an active re-negotiation of their relationship with the viewer, eventually turning the “mic” onto the audience themselves. Meanwhile, the sculptures and drawings by Brishty Alam draw on the structural features of everyday reality to deliver material forms that act ever more autonomously – instilling their effects onto a broader aesthetic regime.

Alam’s work explores the material dynamics of shapes and designs associated with scientific equipment, like chemistry flasks and reaction chambers. With her processual approach to art-making, often referencing and reusing drawings, sketches, calculations, and graphs, her work gains a modular quality that resonates with her attention to the abstract and transformative potential of parts and particles. Another white solid references the mundane reality of chemical compounds, which seems tied more to stasis or immutability than wondrous transmutation. Yet, in their structural depths, these forms nonetheless reveal strange and compelling worlds, each with its own intricate poetics and sense.

Between the two practices, change comes gradually – from within solid, at times whimsically rigid, forms. As such, however, it expresses the possibility of transformation of even the most unyielding structures and systems – whether scientific codes of knowledge production or the societal regimes and attention economies that dictate who gets to speak and when. Solid Mesh accepts the cold embrace of material reality, in which one cannot help but feel small and powerless. Yet, just as the zoomed-in, micro-perspective of the microphone mesh in the Performance paintings or the textures and fissures within Another white solid dance dangerously on the edge of becoming their opposites, the subtle voices of material landscapes – their fields of intensity – anticipate a shift in our own embodied perspectives and, through that, an alternative vision of what’s to come.

Domen Ograjenšek

 

Brishty Alam (born in London, lives and works in Vienna) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Her exhibitions include Palais des Beaux Arts Wien (2024); Baba Vasa’s Cellar, Shabla, Bulgaria (2024); SET Kensington, London (2024); Lady Liberty Library, Berlin (2024); Ve.Sch, Vienna (2024); the Office, Vienna (2023); Belvedere 21 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2023); Festival der Regionen, Lungitz/Gusen (2023); GOMO, Vienna (2023); Memphis, Linz (2022); Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2022); Ajker, Tati, London (2022); French Riviera, London (2021); Haus Wien(2021); Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw (2019); and Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (2019). Her works are part of the collections of the Austrian Federal Arthotek and the Wien Museum.

David Gruber (born in Linz, Austria, lives and works in Vienna) studied painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Prof. Judith Eisler and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with Prof. Monika Baer and Prof. Amy Sillman. Recent exhibitions include Maebashi Art Practice, Maebashi, Japan (2024); Klausgasse, Vienna (2024); UA26, Vienna (2023); EXILE, Vienna (2022); and Trust, Vienna (2021).

Domen Ograjenšek (born in Celje, Slovenia, lives and works in Vienna) is a writer and curator specialising in contemporary visual art. Her writing has been featured in art magazines and online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, etc. Magazine, Maska Magazine, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna and Radio Študent. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at Aksioma –Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana; New Jörg, Vienna; Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana; Center for Contemporary Arts Celje; Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Kresija Gallery, Ljubljana, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, SCCA Ljubljana, and Museum of Madness, Trate.

ARTISSIMA, Turin

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s edition of ARTISSIMA with a dialogue presentation of works by Vienna-based artist Brishty Alam (*1988) and Erfurt-based artist Erik Niedling (*1973).

The works by Nielding and Alam engage in a dialogue on fragility, transformation, and the forces — both material and immaterial — that shape how we remember, understand, and preserve our histories and knowledge.

The transmutation of the artist’s archive into a molecular image mirrors the changing and evolution of the biological body, where molecules shift and redefine what is preserved and what is lost. Just as memory is ephemeral and subject to fragmentation, the body of work, much like the biological body, undergoes a continual process of transformation. This interplay of molecules — whether in art or science — shapes the delicate balance between what is passed down and what dissolves in the process.

→Brishty Alam

→Erik Niedling

→artissima.it