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Breaking Geometries
Henrik Eiben, Mike Meiré, Beat Zoderer,
Bartha Contemporary, July 3 to September 2, 2017
Review by John Stephens
July and August tend to be the months, before the new autumn programmes kick in,
when the gallery season is often a little flat; a time when there are academy-type
shows, collective shows and the like. Bartha Contemporary too has a collective show
during this period.
But as ever, Niklas von Bartha, the Swiss owner and curator, despite the smallness
of his Margaret Street gallery, has been able to establish a really intriguing show
of three of the gallery’s stable of artists, including as its centrepiece a reprise
of Henrik Eiben’s Condo shown in Eiben’s solo exhibition last year; the other two
artists being Mike Meiré and Beat Zoderer.
A pared-down aesthetic is a hallmark of most of Bartha’s shows, and this is now well
known and recognised. But the shows frequently come with other characteristics that
require discussion; in this case the playfulness, the materiality, and something
of a particular interest of mine, the relationship or gamut, if you like, that ranges
between process and design. By this I don’t mean process art as in systems art,
but rather those qualities that are the product of making art, in this case the process
of making the painting and sculpture, and how this in turn relates to its materiality.
And by design I mean the thinking that underpins how the work is arranged or organised.
This show seems to me to demonstrate these qualities and this gamut, and for me
it was the aesthetic that enhanced my awareness of them.
As I’ve mentioned, there is a welcome return of Henrik Eiben’s Condo. It’s made
of immaculately lacquered rectangles of varying thicknesses of MDF, polystyrol and
steel, each of these rectangles having had a chevron piece cut out of it to reveal
the white wall behind, playing an integral role in the work. The whole is organised
within a simple vertical/horizontal grid. But the effect of the diagonals moving
in different directions, as a result of the cut-outs, gives the piece a certain dynamic
that distracts from the underlying rigour of the grid, while nevertheless holding
the piece steady. Once you’ve understood the relationship between the grid and the
dynamics of the angular structure, the piece slowly reveals more. The edges of some
of the component pieces catch your eye as you glance laterally at it and notice the
coloured edges of some of the sections. There’s no apparent logic to the application
of colour; it’s just sparsely and randomly applied in soft pastel colours: pink,
pale blue, ochre - adding a little playful serendipity to the otherwise logical design
of the piece.
Henrik Eiben Condo Lacquer and magnets on mdf, Polystyrol and steel (2015)
New in this show is another Eiben piece that seems a lot more intuitive. Consisting
of a series of equal-sized copper triangles, some painted with acrylic, joined and
suspended from the ceiling, it dangles in a vague helix, making it look a little
like triangular pennants of bunting animated by a soft breeze. The triangles are
all of a similar size, and they’re joined, sometimes by short, bent copper rods welded
to the triangle, and sometimes by bending a lozenge-shaped piece of copper through
its middle to create two adjoining triangular surfaces. Despite its simplicity, and
the austerity of its design, it has a carefree and intuitive quality, revealing the
process of its making in the tarnishing scorch marks of the welding process. The
connotations with bunting are apparently not amiss, as the series of works to which
it belongs; the Tom Boy, Great Joy series, was made in Sao Paulo, influenced by Brazilian
carnival bunting.
Henrik Eiben Tom Boy Great Joy Series Copper and acrylic paint 2012
The relationship between design, the making process and intuition is manifest in
Beat Zoderer’s Ringfaltung (Folded Loop). The piece consists of four linked arced
segments of varying diameter, arranged flat on the wall, so that it gives the illusion
of a flattened Möbius ring, with each perfectly arced segment consisting of two colours.
With its duality of a rigorous organisation of arced segments, it suggests a single
sweeping gesture that contradicts its more rigorous conception, thereby creating
an intuitive and playfully dynamic feel.
Beat Zoderer Ringfaltung Acrylic on aluminium 2013
Taking the idea of the Möbius loop structure a little further, the free-standing
three-dimensional piece Möbius Schliefe (Möbius Ring) consists of a continuous series
of loops: joined ribbons of curved aluminium sheet of varying widths and colours,
riveted together end-to-end. It has a rough-and-ready appearance, feeling like one
of those things an artist might do as a way of using up spare pieces of material
left over from making something else. But rather than detracting from its quality,
this actually becomes its charm. The tell-tale signs of the ad-hoc way in which it
was made are not only the strips of varying width, but also the pop-riveted holes
drilled into them - a mistake, as they were not used. It all adds to the playful
and intuitive serendipity of the piece. Looking from different angles, one is compelled
to try and trace the continuity of its contiguous narrow looping planes. As it traces
through space, assuming a different set of looping arrangements, it seems to reveal
something about the artist’s thinking process. While there is clearly a set of rigorous
methods that conceptually underpin his work, there appears also to be an element
in his attitude that defies the design system and organised thought, to engage in
an acknowledgement of the potential of the material, and the trial-and-error nature
of the thinking/making process.
Beat Zoderer Möbius Schliefe Paint on metal (2011)
Materiality and design are also at the centre of Mike Meiré’s practice. Essentially
a designer of newspapers, in partnership with his brother (he was responsible for
updating the design of the long-established and somewhat conservative Swiss German
newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung), he developed an interest in the design of newspaper
layouts as the basis for a series of paintings and screen prints. Using the layout
grid of actual newsprint, he goes through a process in which he selectively paints
out the type with blocks of colour using industrial lacquer, thereby creating abstract
compositions in which the weight or dominance of a particular colour replaces that
of the headlines and the importance of the news content. It’s a way of connecting
the rarified world of artistic abstraction to the materiality of the world at large,
through designing how current events in that world, and opinions about it, are presented.
The Ends of the Universe VIII is a typical example. Here, the two columns of print
have been transformed into two columns of tonally opposing pigment; a left-hand column
of white blocks of lacquer against the yellowing newsprint paper, and a right-hand
column of alternating black and orange rectangles. In The Ends of the Universe VI,
the left-hand column of two differently-sized blocks of pure white alternate with
the yellowing newsprint, alongside a right-hand column of blocks of black lacquer,
separated by slivers of newsprint. Both pieces establish pure minimalist compositions
that, were it not for the evidence of the newsprint and their own materiality, seem
very far removed from the actuality of the world from which the works derive.
Mike Meiré Ends of the Universe VI (left) Ends of the Universe VIII (right) Lacquer
paint on newsprint (2013)
As an extension to his preoccupation with print, Meiré has used print himself to
produce a portfolio of screen prints, also based on newspaper layout design. For
this series, he’s taken various printed pages and cut away the type, leaving rectangular
holes and the flimsy supporting frame of the newsprint edges. These have been allowed
to behave randomly, as they might be expected to in their flimsiness, and photographed
in this state. The resultant photographs have been processed into high-contrast
black and white images, and then, using both the negative and the positive, they
have been screen-printed onto white paper. The results present an interesting series
of serendipitously three-dimensional-looking images that through their processing
have migrated from the actuality of news reporting to the poetics of abstraction.
And in doing this they articulate for me, in an apposite way, the idea of a relationship
between process and design.
John Stephens
August 2017
Mike Meiré from the series Seven Days a Week, a portfolio of seven screen prints
(2014)