Dec 5th 2014

Anna Grath: Eine Bürste als Krücke

@ Airstream Residency

2233 S. Throop, (6th floor - Space 613) Chicago, IL 60608

Opening Friday, December 5th, from 6PM - 9PM

Airstream Residency is pleased to announce a new exhibition of works by visiting Hamburg artist-in-residence Anna Grath titled Eine Bürste als Krücke on Friday, December 5th.

The artist Anna Grath, born 1983, produces sculptural frameworks that function as images in terms of installation, register, mark, and render the institutional exhibition wall. Household, used, and everyday objects like umbrellas, irons, sticks, stockings, hoses, nets, rope, string, cords, wood, plastic and wire, are stretched and bent until they are shaped into round and rectilinear forms. With the help of a few pins, they are stretched across the wall. Grath’s textile and sensorial works transition smoothly between image, sculpture, and installation. The artist’s sculptural images are characterized not only by their choice of domestic materials, but tension-fraught knots, glue marks and a unique sense of equilibrium.
The formal openness of the arrangements is expanded by an obsession for abstract-poetic titles, what is filled and stuffed, as well as for the decorative. Whereas the work Pirm (2013), constructed out of textiles, rubber, and wood, ends in a two-part stocking sack, the work Trisss (2013) is constructed out of threads and wire, as well as two slender spruce laths and dismal basement-party accessories. Another feature of her quasi-evolutionary frame-images is the supply of domestically-charged, mechanical contraptions and operational elements like curtain tassels or pull cords for flushing the toilet. They reference the potential tipping point and expected shifting of her arranged and placed elements. Anna Grath’s experimental cadeux vivants frame the emptiness; they function as an (im) movable hinge and padding between becoming nominal and the phenomenological present, as vexations between imagery and performativity.

Anna Grath studied at the University of fine Arts of Hamburg under Andreas Slominski. She graduated in February 2014.
Text: Ulrike Gerhard

Airstream Residency is supported by
Hamburg Ministry of Culture
Goethe-Institut
Threewalls
Mana Contemporary
6018 North & The Experimental Station

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