After the Fire
Julie Beugin, Clémence Grieco, Margret Hoppe
on view 25 March - 17 April, 2016
Altenbrakerstrasse 18
12053 Berlin
After the Fire presents painting, sculpture and photography that abstract from
architecture through focused engagements with formal concerns alongside
a casual and idiosyncratic approach to the modernist canon. Digressing from
iconic concerns of form and material by engaging with the anecdotal and the
suggestive, the exhibition combines works that imbues abstractions with a sense
of intimacy, born out of individual bodily experience.
In Clémence Grieco’s assemblages, abject construction materials come together
with a delicate sensitivity to form and allusion. Working with the raw components
of architecture, she makes abstract sculptures that have a personified sense of
physical presence. Margret Hoppe works directly with the modernist architectural
canon, reframing iconic buildings by Le Corbusier by conveying an experiential
view of buildings often only seen, and remembered as, a singular image. By
creating abstractions of space through close-ups of details of construction and
capturing the details and irregularities of human inhabitation, Hoppe opens new
ways to see and think about famous buildings. Julie Beugin’s abstract paintings
suggest place and space by merging collaged fragments with gesture and texture
to create ambiguous pathways into the canvas that oscillate between flat surface
and spatial depth. Emphasizing the transitory and accidental through a focus
on material process, no one moment or gesture is overly special; the paintings
emerge out of a constant and endless flow of collage, where nothing is too
precious not to be cut up.
While loosely borrowing from modernist sculpture, painting and architecture,
the artists use abstraction to create a slippage of meaning within a sense of
place and space, expressing the constant invisible flow of physical sensation,
and multiplicity of emotional tones, underlying the experience of both place and
abstraction.