COMMA 26 / 27: Ernst Caramelle / Elina Brotherus

COMMA A dynamic new series of commissions enabling artists to experiment and expand their practice

COMMA 26 Ernst Caramelle Known for his unique use of drawing and painting, Ernst Caramelle applies thin washes of watercolour and pigment painted directly on to the gallery walls to create site specific installations. Colorful and geometric, these wall-paintings at first appear to be simple abstract designs, but soon reveal themselves to be illusionistic representations of an extended architectural space. Rooms lead into rooms, walls are broken by opaque rectangles suggesting windows or missing objects. For COMMA, Caramelle has worked within the cavernous front gallery with its vast wall of windows which overlook Finsbury Square, providing the artist with the opportunity to contrast his chimerical interior with the dense urban space of the City of London.

COMMA 27 Elina Brotherus The highly acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Elina Brotherus uses a lucid, disarming, yet apparently straightforward relationship to subject matter. For COMMA, Brotherus is exhibiting a newly commissioned film of a solitary swimmer wading naked into, and breaking, the almost solid water surface of a slippery cold lake. A development of an earlier work, 'Black Bay Sequence' depicts the artist in a metaphorical immersion in which she looses herself to the landscape. This piece is presented alongside 'Time Series IV' exhibited in its entirety for the first time at Bloomberg SPACE. The series of 100 self portraits, taken each day, documents the physical effects on the artist of strong medication. The new photographic series, installed along the balcony in the rear gallery, shows a progression of her slowly changing features as the medication blurs the edge and blunts the lines of her face. Both works show Brotherus physically and emotionally naked. By presenting herself to the viewer as the subject she simultaneously looses herself in terms of meaning or presence.

COMMA26 Ernst Caramelle
COMMA27 Elina Brotherus