Just over a week until I go out to Berlin again. I have been head down in the studio finalising ideas and researching Rococo detailing all over the place. I even spent an afternoon in Tate Britain drawing the picture frames. I can’t even look at a TV programme these days without noticing the architrave around a door in the background.
I have my place to stay, a studio share for 5 weeks and the opening date for my show set.
19th April, Easter Saturday. The run of the show is shorter than I anticipated, just over a week, until 27th April. I also have a shorter set up time, so I have to plan really carefully.
Here is the press release for the show:
Der Spiegelshaal
Denise Bryan is a British Artist based in London, she has created this work especially for the Pavillon am Milchhof, the installation is the result of research undertaken by the artist during a two month residency in the Gastatellier during the summer of 2012.
Bryan works across media, making objects, photographic series, installations and performance pieces. Her work has been described as “Hands on Conceptualism”. Bryan’s sculptures are often based on materials collected whilst travelling, these materials have a conceptual value that underpins each piece. Her installations and performances act as a narrative of personal experience and in a broader sense the pieces interrogate our relationship to the exotic.
Bryan came to Berlin in the summer of 2012 armed with vague notions of the sublime and how this vast, flat city can make the individual seem very small. During her stay at the guest studio in Milchhof she concentrated on making drawings based on her explorations of the city, these drawings reflected the stark diagonals created by its main arteries. This exploration of the drawn line represented a departure from the artist’s normal methodology, researching ideas in gesture rather than through objects. At the same time Bryan was exploring the 18th century palaces of Berlin and Potsdam, looking for evidence of the sublime and the exotic within their invented landscapes, in gardens and in interior Rococo detailing. These Rococo curlicues seemed to echo the artist’s own ramblings in and around the city.
This installation is an attempt to realise these drawings in three dimensional form and to bring together visual cyphers that equate to the artist’s experience of the city. In the summer of 2012, walking past the Pavillon every day, Bryan became interested how the building mirrors itself; also the way in which the glass is reflective, bringing the outside world inside; the new work also explores this phenomenon, creating new spatial dynamics. The Spiegelshaal was an important room in many 18th century palaces, mirrors denoted opulence, but also played with our sense of perception and illusion, this work seek to encapsulate this idea within the Pavillion.
All I have to do now is make the work.
