Nadine Fecht
August 27 - October 8, 2010
Schalter is pleased to announce Index, an exhibition by Berlin based artist Nadine Fecht. In connection with Nadine Fecht‘s exhibition at Schalter, the following essay was written:
The Drawing as Totem
Nadine Fecht’s work is neither representational nor abstract. Rather, they are themselves representations. Two-dimensional, drawn sculptures which incorporate all aspects of drawings such as format, paper or the tactile moment where the physical materials of the drawing are pulled into the work: The paper is thinner or thicker, smaller or larger, warped or flat. The accumulated colors and gray tones possess, beyond their light and dark shades, their own additional characteristics, for example dry, brittle, wet, thick, vibrating, dormant, transparent or nontransparent.
In terms of content, the works speak for themselves. They picture nothing, and they reference nothing; even the conceptual slips to the background. Nadine Fecht’s pictures show nothing other than themselves. That self, however, is more than enough. They operate in the sphere of the symbolic. In its original sense, in the magical totemic meaning, the symbol is identical to what it represents. The Shaman, dressed as a bear, becomes the bear and it would be impossible to convince him that he is anything else. This identity of the symbol, with its representative aspects of reality, appears so foreign to our contemporary thought, because it belongs to a multidimensional worldview, which was sacrificed on the path to our cultural milieu.
Nadine Fecht‘s pictorial sculptures lead us into this realm of the flatly magical, and each work delivers us there in its own unique way. Every symbol speaks to something other, and therefore requires another and internal means of execution. Harmonizing the simple and the meaningful in such a way that the visible speaks to the tangible and the experienceable speaks to the feeling, is what creates the peculiar tension that confronts us here.
Or, put differently: Everyone can take what they want from Nadine Fecht’s drawings. And, despite that sounding so banal and common, brings the viewer back to a question that is anything but banal: What is then, that I want?
Eric Wunder, 2010
(Translation by Schalter)
