Verena Landau »access«
Paintings
Exhibition opening: June 22, 2007 at 7 pm
Exhibition lasts: June 22 - September 8, 2007
June 23, 2007 at 4 pm:
Verena Landau and Ruth Habermehl conduct a tour for the Friends of the
Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig.
We are pleased to present »access«, a solo exhibition by
Verena Landau, at Filipp Rosbach Galerie gallery.
In her series »access 01-03« Verena Landau tackles issues
far more complex than may be suspected at first glance. Her work always
deals with access to reality, with checking perceptions against reality,
with the relationship between interior and exterior, with tensions between
pictorial space and exhibition space. The same applies to »access«.
The artist values the title for its multiple levels of meaning: as well
as denoting access to places, people, information, and works, it is
also related to »accessory« with its legal meaning of »accomplice«
or »instigator«. And in French, »accés«
can also mean a fit or an attack.
In these works, Verena Landau creates variations on themes that have
been running through her work for years. Essentially, overcoming the
dividing line between interior and exterior has been the focus of her
painting since her early work on the trail of old masters in Florence
in 1990. For her 1999 degree show »Transformat« she presented
her »Pasolini Stills« in an old electricity transformer
station in such a way that the interior of the picture appeared as the
exterior of the space, with this exterior in turn referring to the films
of Pasolini. The figures peopling her canvases then were similar to
the cast of 2006.
Women at turning points in their lives: this was the focus in Landau's
15-part tableau »break«, created before »access«
for Kunsthaus Erfurt. Her characters are borrowed from movies by Antonioni,
Bruni-Tedeschi, Tykwer, Wenders. In the »passover« series
(2005), her focus was on people in transit spaces and the leveling effect
of these spaces. Structural considerations were also the dominant theme
in »Diskretionsbereich« and »Feindbild-Verleih«
(2004) - complex works dealing with the co-opting of art by politics
and business.
These themes return like leitmotifs in »access 01-03«, with
the emphasis clearly on female characters who break out of social roles,
cross borders, become active agents. The woman in the first picture
looks out of place in nocturnal Paris where men seek pleasure. With
her high-heeled shoes, the woman in the second is at odds with the industrial
backdrop of Ravenna. Only in the case of the third figure is the viewer
not entirely sure. Might she be hurrying to the office?
Verena Landau does not encrypt her pictures. She trusts in painting
as an effective means of inciting communication and reflecting the world.
She chooses her motifs with great care, drawing on feature films or
video footage of her own.
Hendrik Pupat
The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm
For additional information and viewing appointments, call: 0172. 373
11 10.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to
your visit.