Void-scaping

About

Please join us on Thursday, 15 April from 11am-9pm — Bookings for the Opening, as well as for a visit during the exhibition can be made here, or via the gallery website.

Veronika Neukirch is an artist that knows no boundaries. Her practice embodies and embraces everything as material and subject to place us, to disrupt, imposing a perspective that insists on confrontation, as well as introspection. Over the past three months Veronika has investigated, experimented and played with ‘space’ as a material to manipulate and cultivate. Her Solo Residency Exhibition Void—scaping invites visitors to look beyond the objects and see what is typically unseen. Veronika has successfully wrestled the volume of the Solo Residency studio into submission and animated the negative space as a place to experience, to inhabit and created exquisitely hand-crafted ceramic creatures and support structures that conjure human vulnerability, as well as setting up a relationship to the enormity of space. Huge monoliths frame further sculptural shapes: ‘scapes’ that the spirited beings nonchalantly confront and frolick within.  

This is an installation that endeavours to capture the Romantic notion of the fundamental chasm between inner and outer space, between the finitude of external matter and the infinity within, between inconsequential fragility and ungraspable vastness. Gratefully, Veronika incorporates humour as her Gestalt and we gleefully join and follow her playful creatures into the unavoidable abyss.

Veronika Neukirch (b. 1986, Germany) has been based in London since 2005 and has been the 15th Solo Resident at Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop. In 2019 she graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture, was the recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Trust Sculpture Award and went on to become a Lecturer in Fine Art at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Veronika completed her BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2013) and briefly studied at University of the Arts UdK Berlin. She has exhibited, taken part in artist residencies, worked as occasional art writer and curated widely in the UK, Europe and Southeast Asia.

The excitement of the long awaited re-opening of the gallery can not be overstated: celebrating two remarkable women with solo exhibitions (Rithika Pandey: No Rushing for Warmth and Veronika Neukirch: Void—scaping). Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is proud to be opening its doors with a ‘double’ experience and the opportunity to see the works of two dynamic and brave female practices exploring world making from highly contrasting viewpoints. 

A painter and a sculptor investigating and excavating the worlds they inhabit to better understand themselves and others.   Veronika Neukirch confronts the universe with the philosopher’s eye and a child’s spirit; Rithika Pandey deciphers symbols and rituals, cultural mysteries and formulates them anew.  

The two exhibitions will reward the viewer with two worlds, two views to world making, interpreting and navigating as well as reflecting. Both artists have invented characters allowing you into the works yet confounding interpretation. The humour and playfulness within both Rithika’s and Veronika’s works are gentle doorways providing an entrance into layers of profundity.

About Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop and the Workshop Foundation:

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is an exhibition and residency space in London and unique in its approach to bringing artists and their practices to the public. They support a diverse range of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists by providing them with space and time to develop their practice, network within our growing community, be mentored by team members and crucially be introduced to their expansive network of collectors, art educators, professionals and visitors. 

Through their residency programmes and exhibitions, they give artists, curators and theorists a platform to present work and share ideas as well as creating an environment for freethinking and exchange. 

They have now organised more than 40 exhibitions with over 120 artists and curators, with 10 exhibitions and 25 artists in residence a year, drawing in international audiences and participants, as well as being a local landmark in the community of Kensington and Chelsea and its surrounds.

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop was founded in 2015 by artist Stacie McCormick in a former builder’s merchant.