Kerstin Brätsch and KAYA: _Ruine / _KOVO

Fondazione Memmo presents: Kerstin Brätsch_Ruine / KAYA_KOVO at the Scuderie of Palazzo Ruspoli. The exhibition curated by Francesco Stocchi will be open to the public from May 4 to November 11, 2018.

As suggested by the split title, the exhibition consists of two distinct parts: the Casa and the Stalla. In the Casa, the main gallery space, _Ruine showcases the artist’s solo practice. _KOVO occupies the smaller Stalla space and is comprised of offerings by KAYA—the sustained collaborative project of Brätsch and artist Debo Eilers.

Titled with the German word Ruine—ruin in English, rovina in Italian—this exhibition continues Brätsch’s longstanding interest in destabilizing and expanding the language of painting. One tactic of this methodology involves ongoing collaborations with artisans to interrogate and provoke the notions of subjectivity historically ascribed to the figure of the Painter.

A new group of marbling paintings [“Psychopompo”] from the ongoing series “Unstable Talismanic Rendering,” made with German master marbler Dirk Lange, will be shown alongside new stuccomarmo works, created in collaboration with the Roman artisan Walter Cipriani.

Seen together, the installation suggests an ancient site—a ruin—caught between decay and reconstruction, a liminal and visionary place of transitions.

As part of the residency offered by the foundation, KAYA has spent a month working on site at the Fondazione Memmo to create a place-specific intervention: _KOVO. For this iteration, the ongoing KAYA collaboration—which can be imagined as a violent collision between painting and sculpture—presents a series of KAYA lamps and KAYA skins.

KOVO—covo in Italian, cave in English—is also a term for a hybrid man–cow. This hybridity sets the tone for Brätsch and Eilers’s working process: KAYA’s paintings are semi-human, conjuring the specters of animism and science fiction. In the darkness of the cave, under the glow of the lamps, KAYA celebrates a rite of evocation. Yet KAYA’s paintings flee their humanity, refusing their determining destiny: they overflow into savagery, the realm of animality, where ritual and transgression are at home.

For _KOVO, Brätsch and Eilers are joined by Naples-based sound artist and musician Nicolas An Xedro, who is currently investigating preverbal states of consciousness and matter in its simultaneous stages of composition/decomposition.

This project takes advantage of the Fondazione Memmo’s unique position and mission, which allowed the artists to create works in situ and employ materials and techniques previously unfamiliar to them, communing with the city of Rome’s historical and artisanal fabrics.

Every day from 11am to 6pm (closed on Tuesdays)
Free admission
artecontemporanea [​at​] fondazionememmo.it