Iris Andraschek. ORDINAIRE BLAU

About

Fine-lined renditions of striking faces and heads are meticulously and realistically, as it were, drawn on semi-opaque foil. The artist has emphasised the subjects' distinctive features with lettering or patterns, so concealing the original faces. On a second drawing of each on another sheet, she lays the heads around a dense, delicately worked mesh of ornaments and arabesques, in the stylised foliage of which sentences from conversations with those portrayed are interwoven. This process of covering/revealing is repeated in a number of photographs. The photographs also have embroidered raw silk cloths tacked onto them, as do some of the drawings on display.
The portrait drawings and the photos show people who have fled to Turkey from Aleppo, as well as their current surroundings. Iris Andraschek has developed her exhibition project on the basis of their history.

Soap from Aleppo, of strangely archaic beauty — simple grey-green blocks, visibly shaped by the hand-manufacturing process, each embossed with an interlaced stamp, stand in the gallery stacked in a small pyramid. Iris Andraschek had travelled on an impulse from Istanbul to the Syrian-Turkish border in the spring of 2016 to meet the bearer's of a 1000-year tradition of soap manufacture who had fled from Aleppo, and to follow the production process.