Introduction
Chaos and order, beauty and danger, Isa Melsheimer's sculptures made from green glass shards seem to combine contradictory impulses. Assembled from hundreds of pieces, the sculptures demonstrate mutable characteristics of glass, thus, for example, the combination of fragility and strength, and the material’s twofold ability to protect from the elements (as window) and threaten violence (as sharp fragment). Made by hand from broken bottles, they resemble mysterious mountainous landscapes.
Paired with Lorenz Attractor, a large-scale textile work that gracefully translates complex mathematical structures into fine yarn embroideries and applied pearls, Melsheimer’s works imbue The Window space with a rich web of intellectual, formal and yet visceral associations. The butterfly, chaos theory's most iconic image, hovers in Lorenz Attractor as guardian of this new kind of spatial poetics. In addition, a selection of gouaches by the artist will be presented throughout the other rooms of the gallery.
The group of three projects takes as its point of departure the distinct properties of the exhibition space: framed by a glass window, it resembles a vitrine or storefront.
For the first intervention by Ceal Floyer in March, her 2002 work Warning Birds covered the glass pane with countless dark silhouettes of birds. The transparency we associate with windows was interrupted and the function of both the window and the cautionary stickers undone. For the concluding intervention by Karin Sander in June, a site-specific geolocation tag on the glass window will self-referentially mark the gallery’s site, while referring to the global network in which this digital mapping is coded.
The exhibitions draw on the long art historical tradition of views through a window. Whether looking in to discover a private space or looking out to see a wider world, the window has represented the threshold between distinct realms. Especially beloved by 19th century European painters, to the Romantics the view out of the window represented a boundary between interior thoughts and the outside, between private and public, but often also between constraint and the freedom to wander the world. Their view into the world represented a longing to see distant lands.
At the same time, the view inside also had its equivalent desire: seeking to discover a protected space, the safety of family and property. Apart from the known, there was also the exploration of the wondrous. Since the 17th century cabinets of curiosity were assembled and later depicted. Much later, the first photographers, perhaps remembering this wonder of objects displayed in vitrines, took pictures of shop windows. The urban shop window became a new site where fantasy and desire met. In the 20th century, several artists designed groundbreaking window displays for commercial stores that mixed art and fashion, among them Salvatore Dali, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg. Claes Oldenburg and the Canadian artist group General Idea created actual walk-in stores to present their art.
But the idea of a special vitrine was explored by avant-garde artists such as Yves Klein and Marcel Broodthaers for conceptual projects. The former exhibited “the void”, the latter created a fictional museum, all the while playing with the traditional function of such exhibition architecture.
Three special talks by Hyunjung Woo, Curator at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art will take place at Esther Schipper, Seoul during each presentation:
Ceal Floyer: Saturday March 11, 2pm
Isa Melsheimer: Saturday April 29, 2pm
Karin Sander: Saturday June 10, 2pm