Friday 12.12.2014

Isa Melsheimer at ikob – Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst

Every limit is a threshold that indefinitely widens the space. Every frontier is a contact zone that opens to 'the Other'.

Closing the topic series of Fata Morgana and opening a new one dealing with the status of the object, Synapsen presents an original series of works – curtains, veils and cloths – of German artist Isa Melsheimer. Draped in numerous limits, frontiers and thresholds as a series of dividers, the ikob will be inhabited by a multitude of stimuli.

Like membranes on which the picture is fixed, close and distant, spatial and installation-like, the curtains oscillate between transparency and opacity, opening and closing spaces, literally unveiling what the surface has to say about the depths. Much more than mere ornaments, the pictures that have been embroidered, sewn, patched or fused on the cloths are either taken from the constant stream of media pictures that surround us – often stained by certain violence – or borrowed from the register of architectural topographies. Close, they talk about our everyday surroundings, its precarious nature and anachronism; distant, they demonstrate the emergency of catastrophes and the gaps that form on the surface of the Earth: sudden sinkholes in a road, pearled holes; boat people drifting on a sea of fabric; a ghost house trapped in a net of motorway feeder roads taking shelter in a corner of a mattress…

Synapsen offers a visual reflexion on the sensitive experience of the threshold and, simultaneously, about the close and the distant.

BIOGRAPHY: Isa Melsheimer (*1968 in Neuss, Germany, lives in Berlin) studied at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and was an artist in residency in Marfa Texas, Los Angeles, Istanbul and Rome. In her sculptures and installations, she repeatedly refers to architecture, urbanism and landscaping. The form of expression with which she discusses mostly uninhabited or endangered situations is often linked to the constant change in scale and perspective. Melsheimer is represented by the galleries of Esther Schipper (Berlin), nächst St. Stephan (Vienna) and Jocelyn Wolff (Paris). Important exhibitions took place at, among others: Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Museum of Art Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Carré d'Art contemporain Nîmes and the ikob (Fata Morgana).