Tess Jaray

ART DÜSSELDORF

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EXILE is pleased to participate in this year’s Art Düsseldorf with a presentation of works by Tess Jaray (born 1937), Kerstin von Gabain (born 1979), Nschotschi Haslinger (born 1982), and Jobst Meyer (1940-2017). You can find us at booth F06.

 

 

→Tess Jaray
→Kerstin von Gabain
→Nschotschi Haslinger
→Jobst Meyer
→Art Düsseldorf

 

10×1000

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE and the participating artist have taken the ongoing global crises as a starting point to offer selected artworks at a reduced price to directly support various charitable causes. The ten selected artworks were offered at a fixed price of 1.000 EUR to be donated directly by the buyer to the cause selected by the respective artist donating the work.

We would like to thank everyone for taking initiative, acquiring an artwork and donating to the causes selected by each artist. Thank you!

The offered artworks of 10×1000 were:

Kinga Kiełczyńska: Hidden interface (beaver and Andrii), 2022. Garden waste of hand-carved hazelnut shoots, beaver-worked driftwood, reclaimed cables, 90 x 60 x 60 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2022
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Polish Humanitarian Action

Erik Niedling: Future 01/19/17, 2017. Tin, Lead, 8 x 53 x 18.5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Nschotschi Haslinger: Untitled, 2019. Color pencil on paper, 30 x 42 cm
Features on the cover of →Index Nr 86, Jan 2019
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Kerstin von Gabain: Pear I & II, 2022. Wax, 13 x 6 x 6 cm each
500 EUR each to be donated directly to →Caritas Ukraine Funds

Gwenn Thomas: Standard Candles, 2017. Wood and black acrylic paint, 52 x 46 x 26,5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Martin Kohout: Coll., Mongolia-Cambodia, 2016. Wood, stamps, plastic grid, 52 x 34 x 7 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Sine Hansen: Bohrer mit Birne, 1970. Screen print, 61 x 42 cm.
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2021.
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Medeor Fund for Ukrainian hospitals

Pauł Sochacki: Waiting for the rainbow, 2022. Oil on canvas, 27 x 27 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →United Nations Refugee Agency

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz: Tare, 2010. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2020
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

Tess Jaray: Untitled (Navy Blue), 2010. Unique inkjet on archival paper, 20.2 x 24.2 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2019
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Red Cross Ukraine Funds

East of the West

Posted on by Regina Regina

In collaboration with Karsten Schubert London, EXILE is pleased to present a two-part solo exhibition of Vienna-born, London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled East of the West. It is the artist’s first introductory solo exhibition in Vienna.

The first part of the exhibition, opening on Sept 12 at EXILE, presents some of the artist’s most recent paintings together with a selection of early drawings. The second part of the exhibition, held at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY artfair from Sept 26 – 29, will focus on early paintings paired with a selection of contemporary works on paper.

As a common strain in Jaray’s practice, all works have architectural abstraction/reduction at their core with many of the exhibited works in both parts of the exhibition relating to Viennese architectural details, specifically the patterned roof of Vienna’s Stephansdom cathedral.

By splitting the exhibition into two physically distant parts within the same city, the viewer will be able to experience the earliest stage of the artist’s career as well as the current. Yet the biography of the artist itself, who fled Vienna in 1938, is absent within the social and artistic landscape of the city.

Tess Jaray studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1954-57) and University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Jaray has previously shown at EXILE in Berlin in 2018 with a solo exhibition entitled Aleppo.

→East of the West. Exhibition text (PDF)

→East of the West at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

FEATURES
→Artmirror
→Artviewer

 

Untilted

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to return to ≈5 with the exhibition Untilted featuring recent paintings by London-based artist Tess Jaray (born 1937) together with new ceramics by Berlin-based artist Nschotschi Haslinger (born 1982).

The vitrines of ≈5, situated in Cologne’s Ebertpatz subway station, are defined by their post-war, brutalist architecture. Found within an underground concrete maze of walkways, piazzas and shop windows, the vitrines are fully immersed within the symmetric logic of such rational architecture of the time. The psychedelic hue of the surrounding red tiles evokes an almost aggressive or at least unnerving response. When walking by the vitrines, they recall a filmic take in two shots or, when viewed together from a distance, a kind of dialogue amongst them.

Contrasting the brute architectural rationality, the presentation’s title might be a typing mistakes. If not an error, the first analogy that might spring to one’s mind could be the eponymous 2005 album by the electronic music band Autrechre. Yet what is the difference between untitled and untilted? This dichotomy has most poignantly been explored in the visionary work Untitled (Perfect lovers), 1991 by Félix González-Torres. Two equal clocks are aligned, yet one quickly learns about their incontrollable individuality, their emotional differences, irregularities or imperfection. Any initially perceived synchronized duality will fade with the ticking clocks inevitably ending out of synch. Yet, as perfect lovers, they are defined by their individual identities and not their structural systemic perfection. The untitled perfect symmetric surface falls behind to reveal a complex and humane, an untilted, reading.

The two artists chosen in dialogue to one another work in very diverse practices. At first sight, their link might appear even vague resulting in an unclear, raw or even missing connection. Another programming error? It is not, as both artists address emotional qualities and longings in their works quite similar to the mentioned work by González-Torres. Might Untilted be an (un)intentional homage?

One work per artist per vitrine leaves the featured works isolated and exposed to each other as well as to the passing viewer. Beginning with the diptych by Tess Jaray, that is forcefully split across the two vitrine spaces, each painting consists of an essentially monochrome circular plane that is superimposed by a perfect thin line measuring from the outer edge to each painting’s circular center. Each line is painted in the color of its diptych other. With the lines set in horizontal position and facing one another, the work appears as a strict geometric exercise, yet it mutates through perceptions of color to ask about the interconnectedness between the two parts. One cannot exist without the other, an emotional interdependency expressed through rigid symmetric shapes of circle and line. If indeed an homage, Jaray’s work could refer to a pair of one-handed clocks that tick in mirrored synchronicity but aim to blend into relational belonging through the missing part of each other’s color plane.

A recent ceramic by Nschotschi Haslinger rests at the bottom of each vitrine. Relaxing on comfortable pillows, these beings continue her exploration into magical, dream-like spheres expressing diverse feelings manifested as physical identities evolved to some stage between gruesome monster, psychedelic tripping and post-human life form. Their relationship to one another, in explicit difference to Jaray’s work, remains unclear. The first being, Schwarzes Bunny (2022) alludes to filmic visions of teenage nightmares and somehow reminds of Donny Darko (2001). The ugly bunny, uncomfortably exposing its genital area, asks for attention, care or even love. Fear, isolation, loneliness and loss are integral parts of human existence. The other being though, entitled Vibrationen V (2022), does not appear in need of much attention but seems to have evolved. It confidentially acknowledges its own negative emotional darkness expressed through external feather-like and exposed organs while appearing as a confident, amorphous, poly-amorous, post-gendered identity. Without a need of a smooth surface Vibrationen V has morphed into a self-certain, self-sufficient self.

Jaray’s and Haslinger’s works are left to communicate in their isolated display cases to the passer-by through their self-reflexive, crisscrossing emotional interferences. The paintings by Jaray as much as the ceramics by Haslinger don’t guide us into linear belief, instead they point to fragility, emotionality and dependency as a basic human need and positive instinct. It is each viewer’s choice to sense relations between the works as much as – through the glass – to themselves. 

 

→≈5

→Tess Jaray artist link

→Nschotschi Haslinger artist link

→Gwenn Thomas: Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018 at ≈5

 

Aleppo

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled Aleppo. Jaray, born 1937 in Vienna, has investigated architectural structures and ornamental patterns in her work since the 1950s. A building’s particular structural rhythm, for example the patterned tiling of the roof of the Stephansdom in Vienna, remains a core inspiration and driving force for the artist’s visual translation into painterly abstraction. Yet Jaray’s perception of architecture frees its specific forms from their contextual site and elevates them towards a universal moment of aggregation and transcendence.

In the late 1990s Jaray was able to visit the city of Aleppo in Syria. Here, Jaray was fascinated by the particular contrast created between alternating light- and dark-colored stones that constitute the arches over the entrances to ancient local mosques. Though only in 2016, did Jaray revisit this specific pattern and turned it into the source and inspiration for a new body of work. Entitled Aleppo, Jaray created a series of wall-based works, each consisting of various flat wooden panels painted in muted, often pastel, monochrome hues. At irregular intervals, these precise laser-cut panels, have a zig-zag shaped vertical edge, formally reminiscent of the arches Jaray saw during her visit to the mosques of Aleppo.

With Aleppo Jaray pays homage not only to the specific Islamic Architecture experienced in Aleppo but urges the viewer to become aware of our own fragility, temporality and internal disjuncture. Between 2012 and 2016, the ancient Islamic Architecture of Aleppo was perceived as inappropriate religious content. Within the minutest historical second, an estimate of 33.500 buildings and historical monuments were destroyed through the hands of the IS regime. Aleppo, its architectural heritage and people were brutally shelled in front of a paralyzed world audience watching.

An initial response to the reductive quality of Jaray’s Aleppo series might be based on its pleasing formal composition. All works are of the same height, different alone in color rhythm, amount and combination of panels. However, within its reductive formal language, the works of Aleppo assume a radical shift. Each panel’s shape, when set in relation to one another, holds a vital tension capable of connecting and constituting different, often opposing gestures. There appears a particular tension, a kind of constant disconnection between presence and absence, between being and non-being. Considering the panels subtle three-dimensional volume, the attention is furthermore drawn away from the panels’ painterly surface to the spaces in-between them.

The Aleppo works can in fact be defined by these voids. Like canyons cutting deeply into a landscape, these voids speak of time, of absence, of memory and of loss. They allow for these works to be vast, to extend infinitely as they silently absorb the spectator in an impalpable atmosphere. At times, when in irregular compositional intervals two such zig-zag shaped panels meet, their collective gap forms not only a dividing canyon but creates a specific shape itself. This new shape not only resembles the architectural pattern seen by the artist in Aleppo but can also be seen as a reference to the Endless Column by Brancusi (1938) created as a memorial to fallen soldiers in Târgu Jiu, Romania.

These trapezoidal void shapes within the Aleppo series, also reminiscent of a human spine, presents a moment of infinite silence and of monumental stillness to the dramatic effects of destruction and forceful loss. There seems no possibility of reconciliation between each of the works separated parts with these seemingly simple formal ruptures generating numerous visual as much as emotional responses due to their core root in emptiness and vacuity as continuous efforts of memory recall.

Similar to Maya Linn’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1982), Jaray’s Aleppo series constitutes an immaterial memorial to all of humanity’s violent losses and despairs. Yet through the subtlety of the surface and formal composition the Aleppo works reflect back in hopeful motifs, personal response and collective experiences. Colors as non-verbal language thus can reach and penetrate the unconscious. Historical and individual memory for long being repressed can be experienced through this intensity and purity of trans-temporal shapes and volumes.

Born 1937 in Vienna, Tess Jaray moved to the UK in 1938. In 1954 Jaray moved to London where she continues to live and work. The artist studied at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1954-57) and later at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Text by Dalia Maini and Christian Siekmeier.

Features
→Art Viewer

 

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is pleased to participate for the fourth time in Artissima, Turin presenting, in collaboration with Karsten Schubert Gallery, London, a solo presentation of works from Tess Jaray’s 1988 seminal solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Tess Jaray’s Expressiveness

The paintings and drawings brought together in this presentation mark a retrospect to Tess Jaray’s exhibition “Tess Jaray: Paintings and Drawings from the Eighties” at Serpentine Gallery in late spring of 1988. Within the painter’s six decades long career of sustained artistic achievement, the works from the Serpentine exhibition offer a remarkable insight into the significance of Jaray’s painting, not simply with regard to her personal development, but in relation to the momentous answer the artist put forward to the challenges of modern painting in the 1980s.

In March 1968, twenty years before the Serpentine exhibition, a critic writing for the recently founded Artforum reported to his American audience on the prevalence of “measured formal arrangements of basic lines and shapes in two dimensions” in British contemporary painting. Rather than being read as “achieved,” he provocatively observed, these paintings conveyed the impression of being what he called “determined.”1 By this he meant a somewhat Cavellian opposition, namely that in contrast with their obtrusively expressionist American counterparts, British paintings appeared mechanical, more like the implementation of a deduced and predetermined design, then the result of an expressive process.2

Against this backdrop, it may be less surprising that the charge against British abstract painting was picked up twenty years later by another critic reviewing Tess Jaray’s Serpentine show. “At first [they] seem outmoded, harking back to the hard-edged patterns that were in high fashion twenty years earlier,” he remarked about her works, adding plainly: “The brisk visitor will not see them.”3 This may be Tess Jaray’s plight put straight: All too hastily, she can be sorted with a school of painting that she is undeniably indebted to, but likewise she certainly cannot be reduced to. The critic must have felt that. “At first” is the phrase crucial to his judgment, and if her proximity to a “determined” aesthetic may be regarded as her plight, painting at the limits of preconception may be regarded as Tess Jaray’s historical artistic achievement: To push the notion of “achieved” expression, borne by her process of persistent drawing distillation, to the very inflection point of preconceived geometrical pattern without collapsing the paintings into it. 

At the core of Tess Jaray’s expressiveness lies a remarkable dedication to tare the thin line between pictorial frontality and depth. Kima, Always now (small), Cast, and Still Point, the four paintings in the presentation, distinguish themselves by an intriguing convergence of pictorial aspects that mark a transition from frontality to depth, and vice versa, to an extent that it becomes virtually impossible to ascribe the overall pictorial effect to either. Take, for instance, Cast, where pairs of parallel bars appear quite frontally at the lower right, but rather staggered and foreshortened in the midsection of the painting, as if we were looking upon it from a higher, oblique angle. Or the pattern of Kima, whose tile-like configuration to the left might entice viewers to imagine a horizontal extension into space, whereas the rhombi to the right appear progressively oriented towards the verticality of the canvas edge, hence accentuating a more frontal perception.

Color has a part in this, too. Markedly in Still Point and Always now (small) where the saturation of the hues seems inversely proportional to the spatial indication of the paintings’ compositions. The frontal rectangles have been furnished with less saturated hues, facilitating a “veiled” impression of depth, while the opacity – and with it frontality – increases the further the composition recedes into spatial depth.

Ultimately, since the geometrical compositions don’t form patterns that extend to the edges of the canvases (and potentially beyond), they simultaneously attenuate the possibility of relating them all too readily to the pictures’ margins which would draw attention to the paintings as frontally oriented objects in space. The uniform grounds, however, in which or “on” which Jaray painted the compositions in turn hamper their coordination with a pictorially immanent coherent spatial context. In a brilliant feat of balancing effects of frontality and depth this means, paradoxically, that the “depth floating” compositions nonetheless utilize the paintings’ material edges for creating spatial coherence, hence creating an uneasy, yet intriguing rapport between compositional depth and the frontality of the pictures’ surfaces.  

Through this complex engagement with pictorial form Tess Jaray achieves an expressiveness in painting that even though it doesn’t look immediately subjective in style, ultimately directs us back to the painter in front of the canvas, to her intentions, convictions and preferences.

Back in 1968, Kermit Champa, the critic that had introduced the schematic distinction between “achieved” and “determined” art, also named Tess Jaray, thirty-one at the time, as one of the British artists capable “to break out of the strictures of ‘design.’”4 Clearly, instead of appropriating expressivist tropes of gestural trace, impasto, and the indexical registration of artistic process – poignantly denounced by Hal Foster in his admonitory 1983 essay “The Expressive Fallacy”5 – for Jaray in the eighties this meant to work towards a contemplative expressiveness that breaks out of the strictures of “hard-edged patterns” without succumbing to the self-indulgence of neo-expressionism. If there is something to be learned from her painting it should be that sincere expression needn’t be loud and impetuous, and that good art cannot be measured by the persuasion of a “brisk visitor.”

1 Kermit Champa, “Recent British Painting at the Tate,” in: Artforum, vol. 6, no. 7 (March 1968), pp. 33-37, 34.
2 Cf. Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in: id., Must we mean what we say? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1969], 180-212.
3 Brian Sewell, “A talent to confuse,” in: Evening Standard, 19 May 1988.
4 Champa 1968, 35.
5 Cf. Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” in: Art in America, vol. 71 (January 1983), 80-83, 137.

Text by David Misteli, 2021

 

Further Information

→Kermit Champa, “Recent British Painting at the Tate,” in: Artforum, vol. 6, no. 7 (March 1968), pp. 33-37

→Brian Sewell, “A talent to confuse,” in: Evening Standard, 19 May 1988. (PDF, 700 kb)

→Serpentine Gallery exhibition

→Tess Jaray artist link

→Silvie Aigner: Starker Auftritt der österreichischen Galerien, Parnass, Nov 9, 2021

VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

Posted on by Regina Regina

In collaboration with Karsten Schubert London, EXILE is pleased to present a two-part solo exhibition of Vienna-born, London-based artist Tess Jaray entitled East of the West. It is the artist’s first introductory solo exhibition in Vienna.

The first part of the exhibition, opening on Sept 12 at EXILE, presents some of the artist’s most recent paintings together with a selection of early drawings. The second part of the exhibition, held at VIENNA CONTEMPORARY artfair from Sept 26 – 29, will focus on early paintings paired with a selection of contemporary works on paper.

As a common strain in Jaray’s practice, all works have architectural abstraction/reduction at their core with many of the exhibited works in both parts of the exhibition relating to Viennese architectural details, specifically the patterned roof of Vienna’s Stephansdom cathedral.

By splitting the exhibition into two physically distant parts within the same city, the viewer will be able to experience the earliest stage of the artist’s career as well as the current. Yet the biography of the artist itself, who fled Vienna in 1938, is absent within the social and artistic landscape of the city.

Tess Jaray studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1954-57) and University College London (1957-60). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, amongst others the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Sainsbury Center, Norwich, the Museum of Modern Art, Szépmüvészeti, Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art, mumok, Vienna.

Jaray has previously shown at EXILE in Berlin in 2018 with a solo exhibition entitled Aleppo.

→East of the West. Exhibition text (PDF)

→East of the West at EXILE

→VIENNA CONTEMPORARY

→Tess Jaray: Aleppo

 

Coloring Quarantine

Posted on by Regina Regina

Coloring Quarantine was an open call and open access project initiated in response to the closure of EXILE’s physical gallery space on March 13 due to COVID-19. Contributions could be made until Apr 22, the day EXILE was able to reopen with regular opening hours.

Coloring Quarantine has the simple aim to collect and share drawings from a wide range of contributors. All collected 175 contributed drawings remain accessible via an open-access dropbox folder from where they can be downloaded and printed out on any standard printer to color in for anyone experiencing lockdown.

 

Click on link to access dropbox folder→Coloring Quarantine

 

Coloring Quarantine Contributors: Aaron Schraeter, Adam Shecter, Adéla Součková, Adnan Balcinovic, Aggtelek, Ahu Dural, Alan Stefanato, Albrecht Pischel, Albrecht Wilke, Alexander Jackson Wyatt, Ali Fitzgerald, Almut Reichenbach, Alyssa De Luccia, Andrew Read, Andrew Rutherdale, Anna Bochkova, Anna Kautenburger, Anna Schachinger, Anne De Boer, Anne Meerpohl, Anneke Kleimann, Antanas Luciunas, Antonio Della Corte, Arnold Berger, Arthur Golyakov, Aykan Safoğlu, Belen Garcia, Bernd Löschner, Bianca Pedrina, Billy Miller, Bora Akinciturk, Bruno Hoffmann, Carl Lützen, Caro Eibl, Charlotte Heninger, Chiara No, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Christopher Prendergast, Ciresu Tudor, Clémentine Coupau, Constantin Hartenstein, Cristian Tusinean, D L Alvarez, Dana Engfer, Daniel Ferstl, Darja Shatalova, Dennis Loesch, Edin Zenun, Ellen Schafer, Eloise Bonneviot, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Erica Baum, Ethan Assouline, Federico del Vecchio, Felix Oehmann, Fette Sans, Filip Dvořák, Francesco Della Corte, Francis Ruyter, Francisco Berna, Gabriela Tethalova, Gaspar Kunsic, Götz Schramm, Gribaudi Plytas, Guillermo Ros, Hanny Oldendorf, Hugo Gomesand, Isabela Ghislandi, Isabella Fürnkäs, Iumi Kataoka, Jakob Kolb, Janine Muckermann, Jeronim Horvat, João Marques, Johannes Daniel, Jonas Esteban, Jonathan Baldock, Joseph Manyou, Judit Kis, Julia Fischer, Julia Magdalene Romas, Julia Rublow, Julian Fickler, Jura Shust, Jurgen Ostarhild, Karen Dolev, Katharina Hoeglinger, Kea Bolenz, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Kinke Kooi, Laura Franzmann, Liliana Lewicka, Lisa Kuglitsch, Lisa Wölfel, Lorenzo Sandoval, Lucia Leuci, Lukasz Horbow, Lux Cervantes, M Reme Silvestre, Magdalena Kreinecker, Magdalena Mitterhofer, Marcus Knupp, Marianne Vlaschits, Martin Chramosta, Martin Hotter, Maurizio Vicerè, Max Freund, Michael Eppler, Michal Michailov, Michele Bazzoli, Moritz Frei, Nana Wolke, Nataly Gurova, Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Nicolas Pelzer, Nikolay Georgiev, Nora Köhler, Norbert Witzgall, Nschotschi Haslinger, Patrick Alt, Patrick Panetta, Paul Barsch, Paul Otis Wiesner, Paul Riedmueller, Paul Robas, Pauł Sochacki, Paula Linke, Pedro Wirz, Philip Hinge, Rafał Zajko, Real Madrid, Remi Calmont, Ricardo Martins, Robert Culicover, Robin Waart, Sakari Tervo, Sarah & Charles, Sarah Bechter, Sarah Księska, Sarah Lehnerer, Scott Rogers, Sebastian Jung, Siggi Hofer, Siggi Sekira, Sofia Nogueira Negwer, Sophia Domagala, Sophie Aigner, Sophie Esslinger, Sophie Yerly, Spencer Chalk Levy, Stefan Reiterer, Stefanie Leinhos, Stefano Calligaro, Stelios Karamanolis, Sybren Renema, Taiana Defraine, Tess Jaray, Thomas Baldischwyler, Thomas Geiger, Thomas Grogan, Thomas Laubenberger, Tilman Hornig, Timea Mitroi, Tom Holmes, Travis Jeppesen, Ulrike Johannsen, Vanya Venmer, Veronika Neukirch, Viktor Timofeev, Virginia Russolo, Vlad Nancă, Wieland Schönfelder, Witalij Frese, Xenia Lesniewski, Yannik Soland, Yein Lee, Zuzanna Czebatul

 

°°‾‾°°

Posted on by Regina Regina

Following Tess Jaray’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria at Vienna’s Secession in 2021, EXILE is honored to present a third solo exhibition at the gallery of the Vienna-born, London-based artist. Entitled °°‾‾°°, the exhibition presents a selection of circular works created in 2020-2021 as well as the complete set of her latest works from 2023, made specifically for this exhibition. Both bodies of work continue Jaray’s exploration into an increasingly reduced formal language as well as into the challenges of painting with the circular plain.

Stemming from the early form of long-distance communication developed in the 1830s known as telegraphy, the exhibition’s title, a combination of dots and dashes, is itself an unintelligible abbreviation of a well known Morse code. By today’s standards an archaic form of technology-based communication, telegraphy allowed for an instant long-distance connection between bodies far removed from one another. In a sense, telegraphy was an initial form of an abstracted immediate conversation that would become the inevitable standard for contemporary technological societies.

All works in the exhibition share two commonalities: They are round and painted on wooden panel. Both refer to a particularity within the challenges of pictorial representation with painting. Jaray elaborates on these art-historically tested parameters of working outside of the common rectangle and inside a circle’s central perspective. Further, painting on wooden paneling instead of canvas allows Jaray an expanded graphic reduction of form and flatness while annotating to the ancient use of wooden surfaces as carriers for visual communication.

The two bodies of work shown in the exhibition express Jaray’s quest for a progressive reduction of scale, visual contend, association and arrangement. The small-scale works from 2020 and 2021 shown on the gallery’s first floor exist in pairs with one panel inevitably linked by color, contend and form to the other. Each diptych’s communication is held within, a dialogue of two equal parts with one conditioning the other’s existence. The result is an internal communication which presents itself to the viewer as an encapsulated code or language. Only together they can articulate themselves, a two-tone line across a two tone-canvases: what is background color in one, becomes the color of transposed form in the other. Not one of the two works functions without the other, it is an interdependency of formal and spatial dialogue.

What seems almost impossible if not to move to a painted monochrome is achieved in Jaray’s most recent works specifically produced in 2023 for this exhibition. The 17 very small-scale painted plains are now liberated from the limitations a diptych’s internal constraints and appear as isolated atoms freely floating, colliding and bouncing off one another. With these smallest and formally most reduced works to date, Jaray retreats even further from a painted as well as conceptual necessity for visual communication. A dash, a dot, a triangle, a square, a line, a circle, a zero and/on a singular one. Jaray reduces her painterly language to an inevitable core with each painting becoming a skeleton of definitive reduction and minimal depiction.

All that remains, an essential if not ultimate result of many decades of formal and spatial investigation by the 1937 born artist, are flat circular planes painted in two-tonal, at times acidic and bright color combinations. Jaray’s mastery of form and color appears joyful and at ease. 17 basic graphic forms are arranged one per circular canvas, each atom speaking for itself as to the others. Any specific or specified order of things, often seen as a fundamental, is reduced as much to its essence as is the contend of each individual painting.

For the first time, the artist does not give any guidance for their presentation. Each works’ plain and proud autonomy exists and expands once activated through the respective installer’s or viewer’s installation wishes. No presentation of this group of works will be equal to the previous. A perceived order of things is abandoned in favor of a response to these works in future exhibitions to come. The works, either titled In the beginning, In the middle, or In the end, point to a narrative liberation though, when read in order, can also refer to a time-, or lifeline.

The artist’s internal and well as external withdrawal from distinct authorship can either be understood as a form of visual and spatial anarchy or, more likely, a form of enablement. It is as if Jaray has given us the greatest gift of them all. The empowerment to view and engage with these works as if to say: make your own decision, craft your own story out of the 17 individual atoms.

With °°‾‾°° Jaray reduces language to its core. Jaray’s gift, after 65 years of painting, is a joyful and a generous one.