BREMEN.- Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen share a sensitivity for the relationship between painting, sculpture, memory, and space in their extended image practices. Their works switch from two dimensions to three and back again, stretching, straining, supporting, and disintegrating.

Both artists share an interest in traces and moldings, friction and dissolution. The latex used by Desto picks up three-dimensional traces of its carrier material, but due to exposure to light brings decomposes when exhibited. Already before this process has reached final disintegration, Desto works with digital documentation or animation, which is eventually the only state in which the works will exist. Klaartje van Essen often works with wax or plaster. The material may be poured into pre-existing mold-like objects that van Essen appropriates from the streets or her studio. She utilizes fermentation to produce drawing tools, which are also handheld sculptures that wear away when used, and continuously recycles materials that have already been used by herself or by others.

In Erosion Arranged: we sink, I stretch, you flow, a practical material and aesthetic exchange develops between Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen and draws them closer together, allowing the works to touch each other, refer to, and enact a multitude of relationships.

One image they conjured refers to the River Weser, which flows constantly by the GAK. Water adapts and shapes ambivalently. Another related one evokes the communicative and spatial structure of mangrove forests, which are rooted in the water and thus mediate between land and water. They are anchored and washed out at the same time; they arrange themselves in their formations, standing close together and yet giving each other space to grow. The trees negotiate proximity and distance in an unwritten contract of mutual dependency, which can also be projected onto the GAK, Bremen, and the collaboration between the artists. From here, notions of verticality and horizontality, of the relationship between landscape and movement, of gravity and time emerge, structuring the way the works of Monique S. Desto and Klaartje van Essen insert themselves between floor and ceiling, past and present, tracing the contours of the building and its environment as well as modulating their process-based inhabitation of a shared physical space between material and image.

Monique S. Desto (b. 1989, lives in Hamburg) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was awarded the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize in 2022. Desto’s works have recently been shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Westwerk, Hamburg (2024); Galerie Wassermühle Trittau (2024); Kunstverein Weiden (2024); Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich (2023); Atelier- und Galeriehaus Defet, Nuremberg (2022); and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf (2022). Desto is a member of the artist collectives Galerie Duglas and phantom step.

Klaartje van Essen (b. 1998, lives in Amsterdam) studied at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Van Essen’s work has recently been exhibited at venues including de Omstand, Arnhem (2024); Museum Cobra, Amstelveen (2024); De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2024); Woonhuis, Amsterdam (2023); EXBOOT, Utrecht (2023); Personeelskamer, Amsterdam (2023); and EspaceAygo, Brussels (2022).