Lena Marie Emrich: Douces Cruautés
Past exhibition
Overview
Espace Meyer Zafra is pleased to dedicate German artist Lena Marie Emrich her first solo exhibition at the gallery, entitled Douces Cruautés. From April 24th to May 18th, 2024, the exhibition will bring together works such as The Gossip Chair No.3 and The Plunge, as well as a new series of works including a combination of photography and artificial stone, emanated from airport security checks, altogether illustrating the power of softness within human interaction and the movement it creates in the imagination of the viewer.
Lena Marie Emrich is a sculptor. In 2020 she won the Toy Award presented by the Berlin Masters Foundation. For 2021/2022 she was awarded for the Art Prize of the Kunstverein Hannover. In 2023 she received the NeuStartPlus Grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds to realize the project The Darkest Corners in Venice curated by Marlene Alice Schenk. In the same year she attented a Residency at Fondation Boghossian in Brussels.Through the creation of each of her series, she explores new techniques, materials and systematically combines ancestral or artisanal elements with modern indicators of our time. In her latest series Emrich dedicates her work to digital based marquetry produced in an industrial way and fulfilled by human touch. Lena Marie Emrich uses natural acrylic stone, a material that resembles marble but is synthetically produced.
For Douces Cruautés Emrich created a number of new works. The Strategic Game illustrates a seemingly calm woman, pushing a P’tits Voiliers sailing boat in the Luxembourg Park; by taking a closer look at the marquetry, the viewer is able to discover a book by Gregory Salles (1), effortlessly emerging out of her pocket. The Pat Down Series engages with security checks that are intimidating and fierce, a constructed necessity in times of uncertainty. The works feature iconic women that protrude femininity hence softness, such as Riri and Kim K, but what is highlighted here is not only the representational strength of something delicate, but also the concept of powerful vulnerable, nonetheless. In the multi-layered tainted plexiglass, one comes across traces of finger prints caressing their contouring lines. Conversely in Hugging Raincoats two bodies are wrapped in rain-ponchos, standing close to each other.
One can guess from the image and from the camera-angle, that they are in a public space where the ponchos provide them some protection and security.
The exhibition creates a hollowed-out space for the viewer to inhabit. The Gossip Chair No.3 resembles an actual space for the viewer to inhabit and simultaneously a space for imaginative projection. While in The Plunge one encounters an object fused from a beach-umbrella and a sword, where the pole turns into a pronounced cross-guard and then a blade. The reading of this work hinges not so much on the combining of two dissimilar objects but gathers its meaning by pointing to what is clearly missing from both objects: a body. An umbrella becomes a simulacrum for a shield when placed next to a sword, and both objects, simulacrum or not, point back to its main function, namely, to protect the human body, again bringing back to the notion of security.
When visualizing the notion of the body, the question of control and power is undoubtedly the main concern. These concerns are well portrayed in Phallocentric Keychain where a female hand is shown holding a keychain with a few miniatures of iconic buildings, the Eiffel, the Chrysler, the Pisa, most likely picked-up from an airport souvenir shop. In this image, they are firmly under female control, hung, dangling, and made into miniatures.
This Parisian spring exhibition will embody the equilibrium of ethereal beauty and strong forceful energy, both found in the physical aspect of the pieces, not only through the materials, but also within the illustrations and stories created in the viewer’s imagination. The duality of powerful and softness resides permanently in the pieces as the illustrations are basically set in stone.
1. SUPERYACHTS - LUXE, CALME ET ECOCIDE: Luxe, calme et écocide; AMSTERDAM; 1st edition (30 Nov. 2022)
