Klein/Olson: Astrid Klein & B. Ingrid Olson
22 April-18 June 2017
Side by side, works by Astrid Klein and B. Ingrid Olson offer an opportunity to explore the affinities and differences in the artists’ respective approaches to sculpture, collage and photographic imagery. Their practices share a tendency to manipulate or call attention to space, as if testing out ways of being in the world. As space itself—whether physical or psychological—becomes subject matter, they also draw into focus dynamics of representation, social structures and negotiations of gender.
Klein’s collages tease out the psychological spaces implied in existing imagery, paying close attention to how the female body is depicted, viewed or addressed. The artist adds evocative text fragments to images of women appropriated from popular culture, overlaying the scenes with notes of dissonance or ironic affirmations of the feminine roles they depict. In their extraction of familiar scenes, the collages take aim at “a woman’s place,” including the expectation of certain behavior or balance of power in gendered spaces.
Olson’s work responds to borders and the structure of space. Her photographs are performative, recording investigations of an individual body as it shifts in relations to its surroundings, selected objects and the camera. Within these images, the artist casts herself as the anonymous participant in her immediate environment and the active creator of an ambiguous pictorial field, full of blurs and mirrored doublings. Each work is the afterimage of an activity, but also a momentary pause in time as Olson triggers the shutter and flash. Presented in deep, open-faced acrylic frames, her photographs themselves become multi-dimensional objects.
Scale, too, plays a crucial role in the artists’ practices. Klein’s large black and white photoworks and her sculpture Flycatcher tower over the viewer, filling one’s field of vision. Klein responded to her experience as a woman in the masculine art scene in 1980s Germany by staking a spatial claim with her works, and this Renaissance Society presentation demonstrates how they come together to create a space both physical and affective within the gallery. Olson’s sculptures for this exhibition, conversely, are scaled more closely to the human body. The forms, made partially by hand and partially by computerized mill, suggest a kind of intimacy in their size, shape and placement. Positioned at waist height on the wall or in freestanding columns, they anticipate the presence of the viewer’s own body.
Curated by Solveig Øvstebø.
Astrid Klein lives and works in Cologne. B. Ingrid Olson lives and works in Chicago.
(adapted from the exhibition statement)
INFORMATION
The Renaissance Society
at the University of Chicago
Cobb Hall, 4th Floor
5811 South Ellis Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA
(773) 702-8670
Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-5PM
Saturday-Sunday, Noon-5PM
Image: top
The Only Thing Greater Than…
by Astrid Klein
1980
Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers
Image: centre
Headbox
by B. Ingrid Olson
2017
Image courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery