Vera Kox soon at Duve: when the matter is what really matters

 

The opening of Vera Kox exhibition next Friday at Duve, Berlin (in duo with Manor Grunewald) is the occasion for us to take into consideration a specific approach to sculpture that seems to characterize a group of artists including Nina Canell, Karla Black and Carol Bove among the others. What they all have in common apparently is a tendency to put the materials of which a certain three-dimensional form is made of at the very centre of the scene, thus attributing to matter itself a the main role in the composition.

 

If at the end of the last century, according to Jeffrey Deitch, “forms were following fiction” (Castelli di Rivoli, 2001), today, after ten year of info-based art and tons of artworks which employed found objects, we may argue that there are some artists – many of them are female ones- who make materials by following fiction, while considering the form to be an accessory, and sometimes even an occasional support to the matter.

 

According to what the artist herself has stated, Kox plays with “anticipated notions of materiality”, which often trick the beholder with a trompe l’oeil effect, generally addressing the status of the matter the artwork is made of, at the same time questioning the material changing from one state to another. She calls her art practice an “abstraction process”, based on “ingredients” that are “elaborated”, and slowly “defined”. Within this frame – that is provided by the artist herself – the artwork ends up to represent the result of a certain creativity essentially conceived to be admired, visually, by the beholder. In this realm any possible metaphor, especially if not suggested by the artwork’s title, is arbitrary, and secondary to the pure contemplation. And it’s not coincidence that the two writings available on the artist’s web-site are not descriptive of her works, but actually centred on the feelings inspired by her works (and clearly intended to be poetical).

 

Moreover, it has to be noticed that one of the the main differences between Karla Black and Carol Bove is what could actually confer Kox’s sculpture that openness that it is asking for. While Black’s art practice might appear to a detractor as something trapped in the dimension of the purely visual – thus scarcely able to spread its meaning outside the semantic field circumscribed by the “ingredients” of the artwork – Bove seems more concerned about the well known limits of the purely visual. Hence she puts her visual sensitivity for material in the service of a dialogue between the artwork itself and a certain cultural environment the material may recall, as recently proved by her exhibition at Museion in Bozen (until 1 March).

 

Vera Kox was born in 1984 in Frankfurt. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Luxembourg. She studied at University College for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and gained her MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Her recent shows include: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014), Salon Dahlmann, Berlin (2014), Green Is Gold, Copenhagen (2014), Minibar, Stockholm (2013), Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger (2013), Museum of Art, Luxembourg (2013), La Scattola Gallery, London (2012), Casino Forum of Contemporary Art, Luxembourg (2012), Van Horbourg, Basel (2011). Upcoming exhibitions include Vera Kox / Manor Grunewald at Duve Berlin, Berlin, opening January 16th. Kox will undertake a residency at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2015.

January 12, 2015