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56
Les Prairies's artists
IRENE KOPELMAN
This is a potato, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
This project received support from fondation Botin, Santander.
KITTY KRAUS
The work presented in Les Prairies is emblematic of Kitty Kraus's
interest in the processes and almost alchemical transformations
associated with post-minimalist art, Arte Povera, and the artists
Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. Her lamps encased in blocks of
ink-stained ice deal with the disappearance of form. The initial form
– cubic, compact and minimal – looks like an explosive device. Once
the lamp is switched on, the ice inevitably melts and the ink spreads
across the floor to create an abstract landscape, an amorphous black
stain. The creation of what appears to be an ordinary mechanical
accident is in fact a very precise business. In the process the artist
gives a new take on recurrent motifs in the art history of the mid
to late 20th century – stains, cubes, light. A sombre beauty is born
from these changes of form and in it, physical and metaphysical
destruction coincide. Nevertheless, although Kraus emphasises the
sensitive aspect of these works, with their materials (glass, ice, light,
mirrors) evoking the fragility and transience of things, she avoids the
trap of elegance and remains on a knife-edge.
K. A. F. tr. J. H.
Born in 1976 in Heidelberg (Germany), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).
Irene Kopelman is fascinated by the riches of natural
history museums and also by the domestication
of landscape peculiar to old Europe. Some of the
curiosities she likes to explore certainly border on the
fantastic: those rare molluscs with an anti-clockwise
shell, for example, or the asymmetric property
known as chirality which in various branches of
science characterises systems whose mirror images
cannot be superposed. Hands and orchids fall into
this category. However, in order to counteract the
abstraction of surrealist data, Irene Kopelman makes
drawings. In systems biology, as in minimal and
conceptual art which she occasionally cites, rules
govern the generation of shapes. The principles of
sameness and difference are determining factors
as they make it possible to detect the occurrence of
identities, as distinct from the repetition of identical
entities. Kopelman has stated that one of the principle
problematic themes of her work concerns the
"dynamics of difference and repetition: how things
which are almost identical at first sight prove also
to be different if we look at them long enough and
carefully enough".
H. M. tr. J. H.
Born in 1976 in Cordobá (Argentina), lives and works
in Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Untitled, 2008. Collection Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.