While merging into the mossy landscape close to the water, a piece of linen floating in slow motion filters a shaft of dusty light. Then, somewhere else: washing, tearing, dying, stretching, rumpling, furling, waiting…knitting, a piece of land to host re-considerations of a cityscape. This mode of collecting has become somewhat a compulsive routine, skipping the known pavements in favour of gathering textures, leftovers that join the on-growing way through the streets into material lines of abstraction. Forever-fluctuating possibilities seem to arise, fitting mostly into a logic relatable to sign language. The bony sculptures spread into the new landscape; together they create fields of sensation in the space…but let’s not make it too smooth, right?
Thinking through painterly practices that connect with the idea of ever growing processes linked to aspects such as serendipity and a revival of materials and time, Ugne Straigyte and Gustav Wideberg have developed a work specifically for the new Dolores space.
Tiki Tiki can be looked at from several different micro- and macro levels, close or far, in- or outside, up- or downstairs, and is thereby altered in and through the chosen sight of its viewer. Its landscape has been knitted out of diligently ripped canvases that have before undergone a long line of treatments, whereas tools associated with female labour, such as the washing machine, are used and actively reversed into modes of critical artistic production. Together with the sculptures built out of found materials, which have been collected and ordered over a timespan of several weeks, Tiki Tiki manifests a recognition and revaluation of the labour employed for its making, while playfully suggesting a never-ending game of altering the work’s implications.
Ugne Straigytė (1991, Lithuania) is researching abstraction through intuitive painting. Handcraft and physical labour are emerging points of focus in her recent artistic practice. Like an everyday archaeologist, Gustav Wideberg (1984, Sweden) draws inspiration for his sculptures and paintings from human traces. Both live and work in Amsterdam, after graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2015 & 2014. Earlier this year they organized the group show DJ Bipolar at Amsterdamse Bos.
July 5 – 13, 2019
Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects’ project space, returns in the gallery’s new location. Reacting to the parameters of (non-) space in the city of Amsterdam, a series of exhibitions will take place in the courtyard of Singel 372. Curated by: Franca Zitta