Mark Staff Brandl, your "foreign correspondent" artist, is having an exhibition in Switzerland with the exciting, young sculptor Maya Bringolf. See it as a far-off contribution to Art Chicago, Nova and the Sharkevent.
The Project Space Exex Gallery in St. Gallen, Switzerland will be exhibiting artworks by Mark Staff Brandl and Maya Bringolf from May 4th until May 28th. The opening is on Thursday, May 4th at 7 pm.
Based on the perception that communication and exchange energize, the Project Space Exex in St.Gallen has instituted a series titled "Twogether,“ wherein pairs of artists will be working in cooperation. The first show features Mark Staff Brandl, from Chicago and now living in eastern Switzerland, and Maya Bringolf, from Schaffhausen and living in Basel. In their exhibition, titled "Nu-Pop-Scape," the artists allow visitors to meander through a landscape peppered with quotations and allusions.
Visual affinities and a shared penchant for associative playfulness are the origin of the collaboration between Bringolf and Brandl. Bringolf works with silicon, caulked or cast, to create imagistic wall pieces or to form intricate nets with which she mantles entire rooms. Her hanging objects embody an eerie, irrational world of the imagination. Long-tentacled Krakens or imaginary, viewer-eating monsters can be fantasized in her glossy matter. A tornado-like comic character by Brandl banters with a net-ghost by Bringolf; they discuss, negotiate, consider and then whiz away. Allusiveness and impurity are their aesthetic virtues. Categorical differentiations between High and Low, adornment, comics, painting and installation, between vernacular and conceptual art have been vanquished in flight.
Brandl populates entire walls and rooms with acrylic and oil paintings which combine to form huge comic book pages or teeming collections of comic covers. These art works, however, do not present legendary super heroes. Instead, they ricochet whimsically off the genre, bearing enlarged, abstracted details and self-created wordplays, in order to proclaim celebrations, complaints, desires, consequential and even critical thoughts.
The artworks in this show came into being through dialogue and the process of getting acquainted with one another's working methods; pieces were created which are both independent and yet function in the context of a collaborative exhibition. Brandl and Bringolf have seized on and reacted to each other's ideas and suggestions, resulting in acquisitions and integrations in form and content within their individual works. For example, a creepy, glistening octopus-like net by Bringolf turns into a comic character in Brandl's wordless, painterly adventure story. Likewise, Bringolf creates a portrait in silicon of Brandl's swirling, perforated, effervescent comic-hero "Whorl Earl." The artists' motifs mingle and blend. A 3-dimensional, pop, spooky fable emerges, through which viewers can move and in which their imaginations are required to assemble the web of allusions.
Mark Staff Brandl was born in 1955 near Chicago, where he lived for many years. He has lived primarily in Switzerland since 1988. He studied art, art history, literature and literary theory at the University of Illinois, Illinois State University, Columbia Pac. University, and is currently working on a Ph.D. at the University of Zurich.
Brandl is active internationally as an artist since 1980, has won various awards, had many publications and had numerous exhibitions. His shows include galleries and museums in the US, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Egypt, the Caribbean; specific cities include London, Basel, Paris, Moscow, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. As a critic, he is a frequent contributor to London’s The Art Book and is a Contributing Editor for New York’s Art in America.
Maya Bringolf was born 1969 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. She studied art at the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich and the Art Academy in Munich, Germany. She has lived in Basel since 2004. Since receiving her degree in 2001, Bringolf has frequently exhibited in Germany and Switzerland. She spent two six-month, visiting artist residencies in Helsinki, Finland and in Berlin.
Art historian Christiane Rekade, born 1974 and living in Berlin, will lecture on "Teamwork as an Artistic Strategy" on May 18th at 8 pm. The following show in this series will feature Rayelle Niemann and Taysir Batniji.
Photos of the Brandl and Bringolf exhibition will appear soon here at Sharkforum in another post.
www.visarteost.ch/
www.markstaffbrandl.com/
Projektraum Exex
Visarte.ost, Berufsverband Visuelle Kunst BVK
Oberergraben 38, CH-9000 St.Gallen
Telefon/Fax +41 +71 220 83 50
Here's a review of the show in German and English (scroll down) in the prrominent Swiss art magazine, Kunst-Bulletin:
http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/Kunst-Bulletin.html