Wenjie Zhou, Strata, 2023. Detail (Acrylic, canvas 200 x 60 cm).
Press release, April 2023
Strata is an edgeless encounter between two practices bridging Hedvig Greiffenberg’s sculptural works with Wenjie Zhou’s paintings. The exhibition is an exploration of crossing and a meditation on becoming: the process of things being slowly painted into and scraped out of the world as we know it. Strata is curated and organized by the artists themselves.
Statements from the artists:
Wenjie Zhou: I work with the pulsating poetics of painting. I paint wet togetherness, and landscape of my internal situations. Carrying Shanshui (translated literally as ‘’mountain, water’’ from Chinese), an aesthetic that has been living in me since childhood, I use water in my practice, as a medium and a subject of contemplation at once. Shan shui is in my mind, my shoulders arms and wrists when I paint. To tame water is to love and gain acquaintance. Through painting, I push, draw, take risk and watch miracles happen on the substrate with its own light pouring through. Fluid and interlocking shapes appear. Paths intertwine and new relationships form. A painting is the very fact of its creation, at one and the same time the thing in itself and the thing it stands for. To paint is to dance with and think about nature at the same time.
Hedvig Greiffenberg: In my work I explore questions related to epistemological fringes and (un)knowability through sculpture, text, and installation. I find my inspiration in the conjunction of synthetic and organic imagery, centering changeability and permeability of the materials I work with by shaping and transposing matter from one form to another. I work to create new wounds; new openings in the knowable world. I work to create signifiers that flash, vibrate, between what was before and what will be. For me, it is another kind of poetry writing: letting things touch, creating new worlds in an encounter. I am interested in fragility and annihilation just as much as I am in creation. For something to come into this world something else must undergo radical change. Everything on Earth is matter made of matter that was once matter of something else. Except from language. And it holds the world like a large meshed net.
Opening: April 21, 4.30-7.30pm.
Exhibition period: April 21-23, 2023.
Opening hours: Saturday and sunday: 10am-5pm.