39.37″x47.25″; reconfigured map fragments on canvas; 2020
Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Near Distant: Gerhard Marx
at the Goodman Gallery in Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa
8 August-8 September 2020
Gerhard Marx continues the project of transforming visual certainties into new spatial imaginaries as he engages his interest in the construct or idea of “distance.”
“If an encounter with an object is an encounter of presence, then the idea of distance would in some way propose an opposite encounter, an encounter with absence. Of course, there is an emotional root to an encounter with distance; distance is an open space for longing, an architecture for loss, a space of blurred certainty, an entry point to the sublime. The question, however, is to engage distance without it turning into nearness.
I have started to see this project as being inherently political, a project of undoing; of unmaking categories; of unmaking the viewer’s centrality as implied by perspective. Distance would dissolve the crisp outlines of things seen up close. In distance things can become awash, there is no clear point where one thing begins and another ends. Perhaps, I thought, I can undo the artifice of intimacy, build distance into objects, and let things become feral.”
-Gerhard Marx
39.37″x47.25″; reconfigured map fragments on canvas; 2020
Courtesy of the artist.
(text adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue
Parkwood, Johannesburg, 2193 South Africa
+27 (0)11 7881113
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