Vertigo: Heike Gallmeier

About

This summer NN Contemporary Art will be hosting an exhibition of new work by Berlinbased artist Heike Gallmeier entitled Vertigo. 

Gallmeier takes us through her journey from Berlin to Northampton with an assortment of collected materials used to create various installations en route. 

Using a transport van as a small mobile studio, Heike Gallmeier travelled, worked and lived in the van for ten days, avoiding main roads and collecting discarded objects and materials on the way.  

Alongside the mobile studio cube and an installation of the collected objects, the artist shows complex staged photographs.  

Heike Gallmeier creates sculptural constellations based on art-historical imagery. Her works reconstruct pictoral spaces from old paintings into spatial and abstract compositional structures. Gallmeier’s pictorial exploration leads her from the twodimensional painting, to the three-dimensional sculptural installation and from there back to the two-dimensional picture for her works that take photographic form as their final appearance; the picture-based sculpture repeats a painting and the photographed sculpture repeats the repetition.  

Gallmeier’s three dimensional works are comprised of found objects and architectural elements. Each element is devoid of autonomy, validated through the systematic, pictorial arrangement and from the relationship with the other elements in space. Gallmeier’s installations are like optical devices, or spatial viewing diagrams.The predetermination of the found material corresponds to the predetermination of the art-historical imagery. 

The found elements are parallel to the found art-historical images whose pictorial spaces they reconstruct. Gallmeier’s oscillation between two and three dimensions blurs the difference between actual space and illusional space, between pictorial representation and sculptural representation and between the architectural and the speculative.  This project is part of NN’s Ways to think about diaspora season and inspired by the German population of Northampton. 

Vertigo follows Poland International and Yael Bartana’s And Europe Will be Stunned . 

Vertigo runs concurrently with the offsite project Filaments from the Dandelion Clock .  

More information on the project and information about NN can be found at: www.nncontemporaryart.org.   

About the artist:  Born in Berlin in 1972, Heike Gallmeier studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz and finished her studies in the master class of the sculpture department at the Art Academy Berlin-Weissensee. She has exhibited internationally and received awards and stipends of Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn, Senate of Berlin, Goethe Institut and Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice.