Exhibition

Sandra Kranich "Double"

8 Sep 2017 – 21 Oct 2017

Event times

Extended gallery hours:
Saturday, September 9 - Sunday, September 10, 11am-6pm.

Cost of entry

free of charge

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Please join us for the second solo exhibition by Sandra Kranich at our gallery, titled "Double."

About

Text by Bruno Mendonça

Sandra Kranich is a trained pyro-technician. Since the end of the 1990s, she has used fire as the raw material for her installations, sculptures and images. Kranich is interested in the transformation, danger and risk involved in trying to control fire, which she subjects to a programmed choreography that incorporated chance as a crucial element. Gunpowder is her co-creator, taking institutional conventions to the limit. Her work is a critical view on a society constructed from the logic of control and stability, which does the utmost to gain power and contain disorder, chance or doubt. 

Paying particular attention to the space where her artworks are exhibited, Kranich creates strong images that provide different interpretational layers, such as in Bag Bang (2014), consisting of fireworks erupting from inside a handbag. The degree of provocativeness varies depending on where the piece is presented, for instance, in a bank in Frankfurt or an art fair or even in a public space, where it could be perceived as an act of terrorism.

The work Moment Monuments (2011) is linked to the philosophical interpretation of the notion of monument that evolved at the start of the 20th century, when it began to be studied from a modern perspective to include political, social and cultural impacts. The artist’s ephemeral, fleeting, jocular and extroverted monuments evoke images such as rockets launched into space – to configure icons of the imperialist rationale. Furthermore, she also reflects on the idea of spectacle, both as something to be consumed as entertainment (Bag Bang) or as represented history (Moment Monuments). In this way, Kranich’s oeuvre incorporates a constant melancholy, resulting from the unusual circumstances of the fire display’s aftermath, with its vestiges, remains and traces.

For the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the artist produced two painting series. The first, R. Relief 7,8,9,10 (2016) are vibrantly colourful geometrical compositions made of steel that will be exposed to the impact of gunpowder. The second series, Times Wire (2016), is a sort of knitted structure of electric cables that form a shape and lead to an explosion.

Her fireworks are spectacles that last only a few minutes but remain in the viewer’s memory and linger in the charred and transformed matter. In some cases, the constructions forming the basic of the explosions are completely deformed or destroyed. The firework displays are moments of exception given their extraordinary ability to divide our temporal perception into a clear ‘before-during-after’ (the burning). Even though these are distinct moments, Kranich avoids any hierarchy between them. Nonetheless, she repeatedly refers to change as a potent and beautiful feature. Her pieces are exercises that celebrate the moment, blurring the frontiers between creation and destruction, construction and deconstruction.

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Sandra Kranich

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