Galerie Fons Welters - Amsterdam

Sudden Parrallels Between The Sky And The Concrete

Dozens of silver coloured, mirroring papers hang side by side in the artist’s studio. In an intuitive search, Dutch artist Peggy Franck adds loose strokes in white and bright coloured acrylic, gouache and spray-paint. As visual thoughts, the artistic gestures – these wipes, spots, splashes, lines and curves – cover up the surfaces and yet at the same time open them up, unconsciously bringing them to a very precise and thoughtful standstill.

For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters, Franck will transpose these drawings on reflecting chromolux paper to the gallery space. At the same time, she inserts pauses between the drawings by placing several photographs of the same works taken in their studio context. Here Franck adopted a different working process, carefully choosing the right moment to catch the works in their state of becoming. Together these forty-seven works draw a rigid, linear line across the walls, forming at first sight an indeterminate composition. Where the photographs eternally capture the studio’s reflection; the drawings appear ever changing. As screens these works foreground their materiality and two-dimensionality. But, being windows too, they simultaneously invite you to wander their depth, as if patiently waiting to be animated by your gaze. With every movement, the temporarily constructed ‘image’ itself moves. The installation as such mirrors the sudden experience of that moment in which a thought takes shape or a form makes sense.

Franck, however, adds another layer in this continuous echoing of time and space. Through their reflecting surface, the drawings capture the gallery space they surround. Here, Franck will also compose on site and out of materials from her studio, a three dimensional assemblage and floor piece, which in turn references the wooden floor in her atelier; a former dance studio. Do these ‘mirrors’ store an imaginary dance?

Peggy Franck constantly reinvents her exploration of layered dimensions. Instead of extending two-dimensional pictures into space like she has done before, she now subtly absorbs space into flatness. And you will inevitably see yourself, becoming part of an intriguing play of reflection, echo and light that highlights the unexpected, flickering connections within and between all these still-lives in motion.


[Rosa Juno Streekstra]

Peggy Franck (Zevenaar, NL, 1978) lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. In 2006 she completed her residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include: Marion Scharmann, Cologne (2012); Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2011); ‘In Rocking Motion’, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2009); ‘The conversation you and I never had’, Klerkx,Milano (2008). She has participated in several group shows a.o.: ‘Zippy Zippy’, Dorothea Schlüter,Hamburg (2012); ‘Objects of dismissal’, Autocenter, Berlin (2012); ‘Still/Life’, FOAM, Amsterdam (2011); ‘Brabant Now 2011’, Museum de Pont, Tilburg (2011); ‘The shape we’re in’, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2011).

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