Sophie Gogl: Die knusprige Nichte / Karen Kilimnik: Swan Lake

Sophie Gogl operates on various pictorial levels as a painter. The canvas serves as her primary pictorial space, but in extending how she approaches certain pictorial fragments she continually incorporates objects and installations. Various aspects of youth and popular culture serves as the basis for her exhibition Die knusprige Nichte. Gogl draws from digital and personal image materials to create an associatively ordered narrative system that is presented in a variety of formulated ways. Her new paintings combine serial formal decisions, including selecting a specific color palette, with images from her personal archive or digital media. For instance, a series of memories of a specific parking lot as a compelling non-place, painted in watercolor on acrylic, is combined with bathroom selfies and a portrait of the American actress Dakota Johnson. In other works, she extends the painterly space to formats of exhibiting per se, e.g. when painting exhibition walls in a diamond pattern that evokes a variety of associations: a harlequin, shopping for the first time at New Yorker, or her first Vans she wore out to the point of decay. In this sense, Sophie Gogl’s works are based on a linking of her own experiences of growing up to visual cultures and how they appear in media and art. Gogl makes use of ostensibly trivial themes, combining wistfully colored elements with flashes of cynical commentaries in a fragile narrative that addresses both simple sensitivities as well as encrusted social structures.

An interview with Sophie Gogl and Melanie Ohnemus will accompany the exhibition.

Born 1992 in Kitzbühel, lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Karen Kilimnik’s work has occupied a significant position in international contemporary art since the 1990s. Kilimnik’s practice combines art historical styles, cultural codes, and prominent figures from the romantic tradition of painting, ballet, and opera with those of contemporary glamor and pop culture. Her artistic practice draws on diverse media such as painting, drawing, collage, photography, video, and installation. A certain obsessive aura characterizes her work, but this stems primarily from her being a devoted fan and having an extensive knowledge of selected subject areas. In Kilimnik’s work, “staging” and the “stage” itself play a significant role. As early as the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kilimnik presented mise en scène installations depicting broadcasts of stage performances in which her passion for Russian ballet was repeatedly highlighted. Kilimnik uses stage props, wafts of fog, sound and light as fragmentary means to create settings that encourage viewers to drift into imaginary narratives. The current exhibition presents two installative settings featuring Kilimnik’s works Swan Lake (1992) and Kitri and friends at the garden folly (2004). Flanking these are paintings from different years that depict a “forest clearing as stage” theme but which also engage intrinsically with presence and absence. With these and other works, the exhibition highlights Kilimnik’s artistic ability to continually renegotiate the conditions of established narratives within and beyond her time.

Accompanying the exhibition is a conversation between Sabrina Tarasoff and Melanie Ohnemus.

Born 1955 in Philadelphia, lives and works in Philadelphia (US).

Curated by Melanie Ohnemus. 

The exhibitions are generously supported by: Kanton Glarus SWISSLOS Kulturfonds, Stiftung für ein starkes Glarnerland, Glarner Kantonalbank, Phileas. A Fund for Contemporary Art, Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung, Stiftung Anne-Marie Schindler.