FRANKFURT.- Bernhard Knaus Fine Art announced that they now represent Lena von Gödeke. Lena von Gödeke, born in 1983 in Duisburg, creates artworks with a polymorphous and fragile aesthetic based on her passion for architecture, world models and alternative universes.
The result are paper cuts, drawings, and objects in which traditional techniques combine with contemporary approaches. Scientific and digital sources of inspiration bond here to create her pictorial idiom, which she encodes in seemingly familiar landscapes and waste stone deserts.
With great mastery she combines grids, networks, perforated fabrics that oscillate between paper cuts and careful cut outs with contrasting elements of oil painting that are reminiscent of 19th-centuzry painting on wooden panels.
These syntheses possess an astonishing sense of 3D space when viewed from a distance, contain reminiscences of the origins of geographical surveying and the beginnings of computer graphics centuries later.
Lena von Gödekes polygonal compositions bring to mind geodetic buildings by Buckminster Fuller with their static grid structures and attest to a critical enquiry into Modernist and neo-Brutalist architecture and an exploration of the potential for surveying and representing space. Her objects are subject to the same intellectual, surveying and orientation principles as are her works on paper and relate to them the way a photo print does to a negative.
While the paper works play with the visual possibility of three dimensionality, the real sculptural realization of the same provides a further, exciting take on the cut outs by creating real views through things. The surroundings thus become part of the object, the object interacts with its location in a highly charged way.
She consistently teases the potential out of materials from Classicism to Modernism, Carrara marble, sheet copper, natural wood, compact panels, packaging card once again to create unverses, architectures, models of the world.
Lena von Gödeke lives and works in Berlin.
The gallery will host the first solo show by Lena von Gödeke to coincide with the Frankfurt Galleries Season Launch on September 9 - 11, 2016.