Mariele Neudecker - NEW WORK

Mariele Neudecker is best known for her vitrines containing landscapes of forests, lakes or mountains together with simulated weather effects. Here, as new work she has created a pair of ‘eyeball’ tanks with lighthouses projecting into cloudy skies. Using sculpture, film and photography, Neudecker creates a playful frisson between historical representations of the Sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of experience. Her work involves the interrogation of the cultural phenomenon of Romanticism and its elevation of nature and landscape into vehicles for emotional transcendence, philosophical contemplation and cultural identity. Neudecker makes frequent reference to Caspar David Friedrich – the 19th century German Romantic landscape painter known for his allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies or morning mists. Neudecker’s work like Friedrich's, characteristically sets the human element in diminished perspective, using modelmaking as her medium, amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, directs the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension. In this new work, reference can also be seen to Vilhelm Hammershoi’s quiet haunting interiors of sparsely-furnished rooms which exude a sense of melancholic introspection. A main feature of the exhibition is an architectural model in a larger scale than usual, using projections through doors and windows that evoke the same hypnotic quietude.

Mariele Neudecker will be showing at The Royal Academy in December as part of GSK Contemporary 2009. Upcoming solo projects include live performances of “Winterreise at various locations and “Part 1 (Turn of the Screw) at Aldeburgh Suffolk.

Gabriel Coxhead from 'Time Out' says:

'Certainly, Neudecker's work sits at its best when it seems to embody the viewer's own desires. In that sense, the most powerful pieces here - simultaneously enticing and frustrating - are her series of three sculptures replicating aeroplane black boxes: two of them matt-black and impenetrable, one transparent and apparently empty, yet all of them seeming to contain the tantalising promise of recorded truth, ultimate knowledge, of insight free from illusion'.

www.marieleneudecker.co.uk

Mariele Neudecker
NEW WORK