ForA - CONTEMPORARY ART PLATFORM 

presents you a new project curated by Olga Lystsova:

"Down the Rabbit Hole" 

by ANNA Nezhnaya 

​

Opening hours: Wed – Sat 12.00 – 18.00 and by appointment
Marburger Strasse, 3. 10789 Berlin

​

​

​

​

​

​

With this introductory excerpt from the text:
'Dawn the Rabbit Hole''  by Olga Lystsova,

we want to bring you closer to the content of this exceptional exhibition...

 

​

...The first solo show of Anna Nezhnaya titled „Down The Rabbit Hole“ at the ForA Gallery in Berlin, shows neon sculptures and paintings. The title comes from the series of neon sculptures. The subjects of sculptures vary from fallen angels or devils to the most common theme of her works - female images in different variants. Sometimes there are versions of classical art like Olympia or bonded women according to Japanese Shibaru bondage art. Shibaru brings women in a state between pain and pleasure. This is simultaneously capture and overwhelming the boundaries, and also getting in full command of space.
This could be the metaphor of femininity. The women in cages or bondages manifest the idea of peculiar sensuality, being funny and dramatic at the same time. It is interesting that sculptures made of thin neon tubes are created by women craftsmen who have very thin fingers.
The paintings made with lack colors are between abstract and figurative - whirlwind of color throws out realistic details - piercing earring or chain, floating in raspberry red or pine green. Color is very important for Anna’ art - contrast colors in neon or complicated mixtures in paintings.
Communication with space and trying out your own limits is the main theme of the show. It is parallel to he idea of „Alice in the Wonderland“, where you always have to be ready to meet the unknown and deal with a lot of surprises...

Text and curation by Olga Lystcova

​

At the same time with our new exhibition by Anna Nezhnaya

in our other gallery space at the same address,

you can also visit the exhibition "Untitled Toys" / Journey to the Future

by NIKOLA Marković 

​

This exhibition will be open until the end of February 2022
Opening hours: Wed – Sat 12.00 – 18.00 and by appointment
Marburger Strasse, 3. 10789 Berlin

​

​

​

​

​

With this introductory excerpt from the text:
'LIFE INCARNATE / The Drawing Art of Nikola Markovic''  by Dr Mark Gisbourne,
ForA is pleased to remind you of a unique experience 
with universal symbols of childhood by Nikola Markovic.
 

​

​

​

...The artist’s planned ideas for toys developed from his drawings begun in the 1990s, and inspired him to create conceptual, sometimes even highly schematic drawings, images that again served as a resource of immediate evocation.

In the haptic seeing of artistic drawing processes we find compressed or sublimated internal memories (imagined or otherwise) creatively liberated from their condition of self-imprisonment. For Markovic’s concern with early sensate consciousness and development of sensory perception, aims at the revocation and grounding of archetypal childhood memories, the hidden visible and bereft residual traces of the pre-conscious mind.  An extended sequence of drawings from 1994-96, referred to under the heading “latest toys of the future”, offered a set of fantastical drawings for monumental and larger scale sculptures. These drawings of neonatal expression were elaborated through a complex array of heads and mask-like facial presentations of childhood memory. The application of deliberate pictorial distortion and of exaggerations of scale of torso-to-head resulted in strange set of creatures born of an inflected imagination. Yet in turn these drawn images evoke an immediate association with anthropomorphic creatures, such as Jabba the Hutt, and various other imaginings often seen in fantasy films. This said, on closer scrutiny, we find that the detailed and expressively hatched drawings constitute a series of schematic biomorph and mechanomorph entities. Hence the link to toys is also made by allusions to prehistory and to the archetype, archaic prototypes. While the psychologism of childhood is of a far more recent date, the unique role of toys has a long multi-millennial history, a continuous shared application and use in constructing childhood play. We might want to speculate on Jungian “collective memory”, but we have no suggestion in the drawings of future toys to intimate libidinal inferences or gendered stereotypes...


 

© Mark Gisbourne

Tuesday, 25 February 2020

​