PAINTED MATTER
Jeewi Lee, Marco Bruzzone, Sarah Kirsch, aaajiao
22. September – 19. November 2023

The upcoming show at Kunstverein Arnsberg Painted Matter, explores the medium of painting through contemporary perspectives. Painting exists since beginning of humankind and never ceases to hold the stage. What is this fascination with the practice of applying paint, pigment or color to a solid surface? We looked at a fine selection of artists who are pushing the borders of what painting can be nowadays and who are questioning, through the act of painting, the world in flux, from being faced with the effects of climate change to the digital revolution where artificial intelligence intrudes in our daily activities. Painting is a way of observing, of showing the invisible, the cracks in between, the dreaming and a way of communicating with an audience.

Jeewi Lee explores the medium of painting through concept and material, through presence and absence. An immense apocalyptic forest fire that she experienced first hand in Italy became the starting point for the project Ashes to Ashes (2018). She produced soap sculptures made with natural oils as well as particles from the Tuscan forest’s scorched trees. Ash, a symbolic, purifying element, and charcoal, a pigment for the soap sculpture. Lee manually embosses each bar of soap with a piece of scorched bark as a stamp seal, thus manifesting traces of an extinguished past in the newly formed soaps. Ash is also the beginning of new life and here the starting point for the exhibition. We show as well another work of Lee, called Fields of Fragments, a series of sand paintings, where the artist creates monochrome color fields or gradients of sediment she has collected herself, from Dakar to Korea. In the meditative artistic act of painting with sand, Lee also accentuates the nature of the individual grain: each has its own long history, always finds itself on the move, and is thus free to cross the borders of states and continents. The finer and rounder a grain is, the longer it has been wandering. Contemplating these tiny world archives, and the constantly moving ground the sand grains form, Lee questions the definition of territory, borders, and ultimately of belonging.



Marco Bruzzone let his work collaborate with living ecologies and allows in this process the unpredictability of the outcome. His recent paintings are the result of a series of “underwater protests” staged in the maritime depths around Bergen (Norway), among other places. They resemble sign paintings squarely planted in the long tradition of protest art, but also allude to the comparably long history of marine iconography in painting. Above all, however, they offer, quite literally, a muted glimpse of the future – or of what much of today’s art might look like in the not-too-distant future: part of a “waterworld”. The sea has historically long been the place where we have made things disappear – where we send someone or something to “sleep with the fishes” – but it is also increasingly our destiny, and the submersion of everything we hold dear in it an unavoidable fate, which is precisely what Bruzzone is so keen on depicting. “Sink or swim”: this much must also be true of art. The basic mood of Sarah Kirschs paintings is characterised by ambivalences: she confronts an ambiguous kind of mirror of the inner world with the outer environment of each person. The origin of a work is usually found in a (personal) memory, a photograph found by chance, an observed scene, an absurdity or simply an interesting surface or a special light. She give these fragments a space to tell a new story from. They are poetic and combine an abstract concreteness to a dreamy world of real feelings and daily surroundings. Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai - and Berlin based- artist Xu Wenkai. Many of aaajiao’s works speak to new thinkings, controversies and phenomenon around the Internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogsphere and China’s Great Fire Wall. aaajiao’s recent project extend his practice to silk printing and digital painting. Aaajiao used artificial intelligence to create digital paintings which he finished by hand drawing on linen and manual silk screening. Those works capture the pulse of the young generation consuming cyber technology and living in social media. The work connects ancient cave frescoes, with buddhist temples, data center, wireframes and Chinese landscape paintings.
 
Photo documentation: Heiner Lieberum