Environmental Abstraction

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Press Release

The Laura Mars Gallery is very pleased to present the group exhibition Environmental Abstraction (after its launch in Amsterdam and with shows at other venues to follow). The exhibition features a variety of artistic approaches that refer to our environments, from the digital world to landscapes, geology, and architecture; expressed in abstract forms, lines, surfaces, textures, and rhythmic geometry. The eclectic mixture of different styles, materials, and mediums shows personal quests to capture and transform our reality into new artistic abstract visions.

Isabelle Borges explores patterns and structures she encounters in the visible world. Her main focus is on the geometry of the space between things and the resulting spatial dynamics. She generates pictorial spaces that expand and contract, evoking spatial fabrics in motion. The range of her work is broad, both in its aesthetics and its content, encompassing historical allusions, perceptual experiments, discursive interrogations, and purely subjective approaches.

The works from Bram Braam are in between abstraction and reality. Braam collects street furniture, used building materials, and found objects to create sculptural assemblages as an aggregation of our urban environments. Experimenting with ideas of representation and re-defining our daily surroundings, he is especially interested in how we look at our daily reality, what is authentic, what is staged, counterfeit, constructed or natural, and when the self becomes a new entity.

In her artistic work, Astrid Busch deals with spaces and how they are experienced. She examines architectural designs for their sensual perceptibility and their effect on people. The aesthetic experiences that arise through the interaction of all the senses enter into her work. In her work process, Astrid Busch collects motifs with her camera as well as in analog and digital archives. She condenses her material into spatial image arrangements, from which photographs are finally created under complex lighting conditions.The photographs are transferred into space on various image carriers or further developed as sculptures.

DAG`s paintings are produced in series. In his latest works, lines are staggered on a dark background, crossed through, overlapped and superimposed, forming alignments and dissonances, luring the viewer's gaze to its own explorations of light and shadow. DAG’s images can be anything: traces, objects, and at the same time their dissolution. "Subversion must produce its own Chiaroscuro", writes Roland Barthes (Le Plaisir du Texte, 1973)

Found things, used design objects, and worn out items form the reservoir of material poetry for the sculptor Karsten Konrad. Since the 1990s Konrad has made sculptures, three-dimensional installations, reliefs, and collages from these neglected things after the principles of the Readymade and of Dadaism and Surrealism. He piles them up and combines them according to a mnemonic order, linking them with spaces and places.

The works by Martijn Schuppers disguise themselves as macrocosmic representations of lunar crater landscapes or microcosmic images of rocky fragments. They disseminate cascading references of our image memory consisting of art, science, and everyday life. The artist integrates visual simulations of physical effects, reminiscent of failed photographs or color reflections of polarized optics, which evoke visualizations produced by scientific observational instrumentation and with them the ideology of objectivity, measurability, and provability of technically generated images. And yet, Schuppers´ images don’t refer to anything specific and can’t be contextualized easily.

Katleen Vinck’s sculptures are fragments from another world or another time. Her oeuvre is built around components and residues of human interventions in the existing landscape; archetypical architectural elements such as those found in her art often find their origin in the natural world. Her works rarely are finished constructions and rather focus on the translucid moment of transformation. She strives for abstraction, essentiality, and universality. Precisely in the beauty of transformative cycles lies the potential to be recognized as an archetypical architectural element, a residue, and a new beginning all at once.