VICKEN PARSONS
Vicken Parsons was born in Hertfordshire in 1957, she lives and works in London. Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Selected exhibitions: 2013 Vicken Parsons, Kristof de Clercq Gallery, Ghent; 2012 Awakening the Night. Art from Romanticism to the Present, Belvedere, Vienna; Vicken Parsons, Alan Cristea Gallery, London; 2008 Solid Air, Christine König Galerie, Vienna; 2006 Vicken Parsons, New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury; 2005 Your Light, Christine König Galerie, Vienna; Raised Awareness, Tate Modern, London; 2004 Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim; Edge of the Real, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; 2002 Tate St. Ives.
NATALIA ZAŁUSKA
Natalia Załuska was born in Cracow in 1984, she lives and works in Vienna. Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Lisa Ruyter and Daniel Richter).
Selected exhibitions: 2013 curators’ network, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Paper Format, Friday Exit, Vienna; in three-four time, b a s e m e n t, Vienna; 2012 Plat du Jour, Nachtspeicher 23 e.V., Hamburg; Punkt ohne Wiederkehr, Galerie im Georgshof, Hamburg; Konstruktion in Progress, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Studio Building; 2011 Turn on or turn off, Lisa Ruyter Studio, Vienna; 2010 Jabberwocky, Frappant, Hamburg; unORTnung VI, Krotenthallergasse 3, Vienna.
ANETTA MONA CHIŞA & LUCIA TKÁČOVÁ
Anetta
Mona Chişa (1975, Romania) and Lucia Tkáčová (1977, Slovakia)
collaborate since 2000. They both graduated from the Academy of Fine
Arts and Design in Bratislava and live and work in Berlin and Prague.
Selected exhibitions: 2013 Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; Clash!, Art in General, NY; 2012 What Does a Drawing Want?, Beirut, Cairo; III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Either way, we loose, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Rearview Mirror, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; Artists Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London; 2011 Performing History, Romanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale; Material Culture/Things in our Hands_curated by Dessislava Dimova, Christine König Galerie, Vienna; The Global Contemporary, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Rearview Mirror, The Power Plant, Toronto; IRONAPPLAUSE.NET, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava; 2010 1st Ural Industrial Biennial for Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg, Russia; While Bodies Get Mirrored, migros museum für gegenwartskunst zürich, Zurich; 2009 Gender Check, MUMOK, Vienna; The Reach of Realism, MOCA Miami; The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; 2008 n.b.k. – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin.
Minimal Compact
Minimal: Reduction of formal language and color palette, evocation of nature scenes that are condensed into primary structures and abstracted. Geometric regularity and rich coloristic variations with pastel tones.
Compact:
Concentration on small formats that focus the beholder’s gaze and
intensify visual impressions. A certain vedute-like quality, in serial
arrangements coalescing into a succession of moments of rising
intensity, which, as if seen through a veil, still allow recognition of
the contours of the real. Painting that is both concrete and
illusionistic.
Minimal Compact: From widely diverging biographical and
cultural backgrounds, the young Polish artist Natalia Załuska and the
British Vicken Parsons have both come to cultivate an aesthetic of
stringency and an art of quiet intensity. Pictures like haiku, giving
rise to form, character and atmosphere, created with an attitude that
could be described as désinvolture.
And in the midst of this artistic restraint, Clash!
by Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová: a pile of rocks, as if left
ready for a bunch of street fighters or political activists with violent
inclinations. At first glance this work also appears highly compact.
Actually, the artists have created small porcelain sculptures and
colored them with acrylic paints. They look like cobblestones, but are
really hollow, fragile artifacts. While the little paintings by
Załuska/Parsons, in relief-like protrusion, occasionally advance into
the realm of the sculptural, the three-dimensional objects of Chişa
& Tkáčová can be interpreted as an expansion of painting.
The compact is fragile, that which is potentially threatening,
vulnerable. The initial deception, and the correction of perception at
second glance open an interesting dialectic between violence and danger,
reality and illusion. (Thomas Miessgang, 2013)
