BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts presents new works by Katja Strunz for Gallery Weekend 2017.

Falling and folding are the central three-dimensional formal structures in Katja Strunz’s work. The theme of expansion and contraction of space, a common thread throughout her work, is explored further in her fourth solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts.

The relationship between space and time manifests three-dimensionally in her sculptural folds. In the new “Pulp Paintings,” made from recycled and ground fabric and clothing (secondhand, each piece with a past) space, time, and history are condensed.

Places in which historical social processes and upheaval have been inscribed are referenced repeatedly in Katja Strunz’s work. For this exhibition, Strunz turns her attention to the history of the Berlin palace, both the former building and its current resurrection, located in the immediate vicinity of our gallery am Kupfergraben, in which Strunz presents the last exhibition. In preparation, Strunz conducted visual research in the palace’s restoration workshop.

Through this research process the artist created the work “Hollow Face Illusion,” using a photograph of the cast of a deity in the workshop. What the viewer sees here is a negative form, familiar from Freud’s analytical phenomenon of the hollow-face, which our brain automatically understands as a three-dimensional convex face.

At first glance, this work appears to be a contradiction to the series of “Pulp Paintings.” The principle of impulse present in her sculptures, installations and newer “Pulp Paintings,” however, is in fact also found here. In particular, the artist explores the interaction of form and emptiness, the correlation between form and its surrounding space.

Strunz’s artistic leitmotif, the pausing of movement in space, manifests again in a new, surprising sculpture made from car parts. According to the artist, after a quote from Archibald Wheeler, time exists only so that everything doesn’t happen at the same time.

Katja Strunz (born 1970) lives and works in Berlin. She has had institutional solo exhibitions in the Berlinische Galerie, the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, Camden Art Centre in London, and the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, among others, and has been included in group exhibitions in the Centre Pompidou, the Migros Museum in Zürich, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and MUMOK in Wien, and others. This is her fourth solo exhibition with Contemporary Fine Arts.