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Judith Samen | | |
Judith Samen
September 12th - November 15th 2008
Opening: Friday, September 12th 2008 - 20:30 h.
Judith Samen's (Gladbeck, Germany, 1970), exhibition at Javier Marín Gallery in Málaga will be the German artist's first appearance in Spain. Her exhibition presents a trajectory of her recent works via diverse media such as photography, installation, video and drawings.
Samen elaborates a complex web of social and aesthetic discourses by investigating the body. Judith Samen's works are full of different visual references. They function on various iconographic levels of both the sacred and the profane: vanitas meets the commonplace. They play with art's historical topics, just as in the way the Old Masters portrayed everyday life, and also combine various genres: portrait, self-portrait and still life.
Ageing, birth, and death, the great cycle of becoming and ceasing to be are some of the aspects reflected in her portraits affecting most of all upon the authentic that unmistakably coruscate among reality, fiction, theatre and character study.
Samen prefers to investigate the body as material, sometimes biographically, sometimes revealingly, but never in a voyeuristic manner. She coaxes both melancholy and comedy from the body at the same time.
Her other favourite material is food: bread, potatoes, cabbage, and milk accompany almost all of her characters and appear in her performances and installations. Sometimes the food itself is the main focus, such as when she presents fish in a modern hunting scene, or when rituals of food preparation take the limelight, as they often do.
Like the body, food is also rife with ambivalence. The food seen in Samen's works speaks of existential necessity, but also awakens associations with the middle-class milieu.
However, Samen also pursues a double strategy: if the rituals sometimes serve the domestic genre mentioned above by creating a thoroughly ambivalent familiarity, in other places, the food introduces an abyss into the frame, ordinary food turns into a central element of psychological inventory, including that of the subconscious.
Judith Samen graduated in the Münster Art academy and continued her education in the Art Academy of Düsseldorf, the city in which she now works and lives and where she obtained her Masters degree with Professor Fritz Schwegler.
Amongst her recent projects, her individual projects stand out in:
Horst Dietrich Galerie, Berlin. "Woyzeck" Zürich theatre (costume design). Galerie Schwefel, Stuttgart. Heinz Holtmann gallery, Köln. "Leibspeise", Malkasten, Düsseldorf. Galerie Serieuze Zaken, Amsterdam. CSKX-Studios, London.
Other important recent commissioned projects:
Frauenbilder Kunsthalle Ligen, Lingen. "Baby Body" - Das Motiv Säugling in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Darmstadt Art Centre. "Familienbande", Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck International Sculpture Centre Duisburg. "Fotokunst aus 60 Jahren". Art of Westphalia. Ratingen museum. "La main dans main", Bodenburg. "Face to Face - Neue Portraits" LUMAS Editionsgalerie, Berlin. "whiteBOX e.V.", Kultfabrik, Munich. "Can You See the Real Me?" Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
Art fairs:
Art Amsterdam, Art KARLSRUHE, Berliner Liste, Internationale Triennale für Originaldruckgrafik (06), Kunst Zürich. |
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