24. Juli 2021 bis 22. August 2021

Ab Samstag, den 24. Juni 2021 zeigt Lydia Ericsson Wärn in der SCHLEUSE ihre Ausstellung Phantasmatic Graft. Lydia Ericsson Wärn setzt die Reihe der international Studierenden fort, die es aus dem Ausland an die renommierte Städelschule in Frankfurt gezogen hat. Die 1994 in Schweden geborene Künstlerin studiert dort bei der Malerin Monika Baer, die durch eine aufwendige Maltechnik bekannt wurde. So wundert es nicht, dass die junge Schwedin die Malerei stets aufs Neue experimentell auslotet. Für ihre SCHLEUSEN-Schau entwickelte sie ein großformatiges Gemälde, das sich aus vier Teilen zusammensetzt. Zur Eröffnung wird Lydia Ericsson Wärn am Samstag von 15 bis 18 Uhr in der SCHLEUSE für Gespräche und Erläuterungen zur Verfügung stehen.

Johanna Thorell beschreibt im Vorfeld die Ausstellung wie folgt:

»Using oneself as an object of study or the subject matter for a painting may have its obvious reasons, for what could be more at hand than one’s own body? Our body is always here, as the point in the world from which we perceive, move, act, speak, and desire. An inevitable image, it imposes itself upon us every time we face a reflecting surface, yet we can never fully grasp our bodily self. Its many blind spots constantly escape us.

A painting in four parts, Phantasmatic Graft is a study of selfhood across a multiple body image. Separated by a foggy horizon or a turbid water surface that runs across the segmented picture plane, two full-length figures hover in front of each other. Like in a strangely altered mirror image, their faces and postures are almost identical, but their clothing and hand gestures differ. Same and other; a person’s personas.

In his early formulations of the mirror stage, Jacques Lacan describes the moment in which the infant – until then a dispersed collection of limbs, orifices, and needs – comes to recognize itself as ›I‹ in their specular image. The notion of a unified, pulled-together self only emerges in this process of self-objectification in which one identifies with the other that is presented in the mirror. At stake in Lydia Ericsson Wärn’s painting is not the representation of a specific self, but the mirroring emphasizes the ambivalences harbored in the relationship to our own body, simultaneously subject and object, self and other, visible and invisible, a fixed entity and a shifting composite. It is not the painterly gesture that fragments the body, rather the painting conveys an image of the self as always already lacunary.

Cut up like discontinuous exquisite corpses, the two bodies are interrupted by pauses or repetitions, delays or X-ray-like enlargements. An absent hand casts a shadow on a bare leg. One face is rendered as in double exposure, captured in the midst of turning towards the room. Instead of looking at each other, the figures glance outward with one squinting eye as if to remind the viewer that they too are being looked at.

Close by and seen through a door ajar, the centrifugal force of Curve So Big It’s a Circle lures the (fragmentary) viewer into another regime of visibility, from still silhouettes to a spinning space. In the room presented in the video, one’s own body is no longer the irreducible point-zero of orientation in the world. If only for a moment, it is as dizzying as liberating to leave one’s point of view and navigate the apartment room through the wandering camera eye.«

Opelvillen
Ludwig-Dörfler-Allee 9
65428 Rüsselsheim