MIRA KLUG - Spark Art Fair Vienna 2021

MIRA KLUG - Spark Art Fair Vienna 2021

Gallery Rudolf Leeb with Mira Klug @Spark Art Fair Vienna
25 - 27 June 2021, Marx Halle Vienna

We are pleased to participate in the first edition of the new Spark Art Fair art fair in Vienna with a solo presentation of the young Austrian artist Mira KLUG.
Our presentation will be accompanied by curator Walter Seidl.

Mira Klug at the Spark Art Fair Vienna with Galerie Rudolf Leeb - Stand view
Stand view solo presentation Mira Klug at Spark Art Fair Vienna

 

Mira Klug's works examine the dispositive of photography for the possibilities of an altered representation of reality, in which the artist manipulatively intervenes in the image content. In her series

Klug refers to organic elements that are detached from their original context and brought into new contexts of meaning and often appear in multiple ways in the individual pictorial formations, bringing moments of memory and reconstruction into play.

This applies, for example, to the photo series "Corporeal Ornament", in which tangerine peels pressed in one piece are joined together to form a pattern or, in art historical terms, "ornament", allowing for variable compositions. The wall piece consists of 14 parts, each of which represents an independent photograph. This multiplicity leads to the internalisation of an action performed several times in the past, which has an abstract aesthetic due to the black and white component. 

In the series "embodied", flattened mandarin skins are transferred to deerskin as a pattern,

sewn together and coated with latex and watercolour. Klug refers here to the potential of memory or to what has long been "eaten and digested," which is symbolically brought to mind and revives the mandarins. Inside these balls is fertile volcanic sand from Mount Etna, marking an invisible content and in a few balls also consisting of mandarin seeds to imply a possible renewal of the fruit.

"Disembodied Hands" refers to historical set pieces, in this case relics of the Turkish Liberation Monument from Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral, which were left over after the fire of 1945. In partially skin-tone coloured but original stills from black-and-white archive footage, the artist shows real hands that tried to repair the broken statues of this monument, as well as the hands of the statues themselves, raising questions about the process of mutual influence. Human and stone hands become figuratively one and refer to transience as well as historical processes of transformation.

Another manipulative gesture is evident in the double exposure "verortet", in which a belly is emblazoned on a stylised house façade. The house as an architectural fixum is synonymous with the permanence of places and their potential for identification. Here, too, the artist mixes organic with inorganic materials and focuses on different moments that are transferred into a photography-based level of reality.

Text by Walter Seidl

Text Walter Seidl >>>

List of works >>>