Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Claudia Wieser’s The Mirror, the Berlin based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show’s title references Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal film of dreamlike nostalgia and non-linear time. Wieser likewise creates an immersive environment plunging the viewer into contemporaneous subjective and objective narratives.
Wieser is known for her geometric constructions, utilizing a language of Modernism in her materials and structures. Influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, “who underst[ood] their art as a spiritual process,” Wieser broadens their ideals to consider abstraction’s coexistence with experience. She honed her understanding of art and the object, the aesthetic and the functional, with an early apprenticeship as a blacksmith at Bergmeister Kunstshmiede. This studied craft informs her approach to the technical drafting of her multi-faceted mirrors, hand-painted, patterned ceramics, and carved wooden sculpture. Additionally, Wieser incorporates the architecture of the exhibition space, drawing with gold leaf directly on the wall, ceiling and floor, blurring compositional boundaries. Wallpaper and tapestry, patterned with Gothic and Baroque interiors and paintings, further serve to set the stage, acting as both backdrop and actor.
The works in The Mirror are no exception, showcasing Wieser’s multimedia practice where the artist’s hand is readily evident from her colored pencil works on paper to her copper planks. Both meticulous and delicate in her process, Wieser beckons the viewer on a journey of remembrance that is both rigorous and surreal, not unlike a pass to a funhouse imagined by The Bauhaus. The mirror in Wieser’s oeuvre exists both literally and figuratively as an object of contemplation and reflection. Fractured and distorted, time and space merge in a non-linear present. Perception and the position of the viewer is a recurrent preoccupation for the artist, ever mindful of the continuum of sight and memory.
Claudia Wieser was born in Freilassing, Germany in 1973 and lives in Berlin. Her recent solo exhibitions include KIOSK, Ghent; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; and The Drawing Center, New York.
