TEXTS
Georgia Creimer, Biom (ascending) for Room 2.17 | PARALLEL Vienna
Review
When you meet Georgia Creimer, it feels like taking a rest. An exhilarating rest if you will. Specially at an art fair like Parallel Vienna, where the sense of needing to stand out is almost adhere to the contract. What you end up getting, with a totally implicit reasonable decision to do so I must add, is a lot of baroqueness and an overwhelming amount of works desperately wanting to be sold.
She does it with a single main painting. Taking a minimalist approach to her extremely detailed work, Creimer takes a step back from the good old eccentric artist way of expression, to what can be consider as a built-in meditational room to be experienced by each visitor’s desired pace. Even though many will say a room inside another room has nothing simple to it, it does indeed not at all in content -both physical and theoretical-, but in allowing space to the eye and mind after previous exposure to what most visitors consider an overdose of art.
The fair not particularly known by the amount of collectors going crazy per se, has become a great platform to get artists, galleries, institution and their works out there with a bit more of creative liberty and a scenario where seriousness, small talks and all the more bureaucrat to-dos we’re all forced to take part of in order to live from art, takes a more secondary place. The venue becomes a place to interact, get to know and feel people's ideas. And that's exactly what we got from Biom (ascending) for Room 2.17.
Installation view Biom (ascending) for Room 2.17, Parallel Vienna, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist
Left: Biom (ascending), 2019, gesso, acrylic and coloured pencil on canvas, 205 x 143 cm
Right: Biom (accessus) II, 2020, watercolour and pigment on paper, 76 x 57 cm
With Biom (accessus) II as a first impression when entering the room, a watercolour and pigment on paper work seemingly fitted on the front wall of the installation, catches the visitor attention and can be perceived as a teaser that gives birth to Pandora’s curiosity. A white box built-to-measure for a 2 meter high painting, constructed in perspective with its narrower side covered by the colour pencil on canvas artwork and a bench on the opposite side to sit and soak it all in, opens up and creates an intimate space where you find yourself in a face to face encounter. Almost intimidating for it’s brightness, no right angles and ramp-like white floor, the hesitation from the visitors on how to behave and/or react becomes almost part of the artwork itself.
The installation brings an awareness to our own bodies, current ‘art-fair-mind-set’, spatiality and how time evolves in the environment. Our pupils contract whilst our focus increases in order to find balance. You walk up to the painting, realise it’s not digital but a crossed fine lines technique that creates an illusion of colours, bodies and dimensions. You understand how your perception and quick assumptions can easily fool you, and all of the sudden you’ve comprehend the non-intentional intent of the artist.
Based on a blind-drawing process, where only the unconscious and intuition guide the hand over a piece of paper, the final achieved shapes, which the artist extract from the mentioned drawings, can almost be considered as an introspective search of the artist’s own mind. The complexity found within the beauty of it’s delicacy, curves and colours overlapping onto the grotesque result of their combination, provides us with enough material to introduce body, sensuality, sexuality and a non-conforming attitude and ideals to the table.
Georgia Creimer’s installation at Parallel Vienna certainly is one of this year’s edition highlights. With a smart work understanding the surrounding of where the installation is held, it manages to take more than one of us to fully immerse into her work and figure out her oeuvre. From a performance where she is being wrapped up while vertically suspended, a room filled by a giant plate with enormous balls on it, her black and white Biom painting series to her photographical work where she plays with the moon the amount of works to go through is a continuous delight. Anyone that appreciates some historical, fun, sociological and abstract background in their portfolio of artist to follow -and pieces to collect-, has Georgia Creimer saved and faved.
Intimacy 2020 (strangers)
As isolation has become a common practice, intimacy, on the other hand, is one that most of us have been obliged to leave aside. Been the latter a necessity as humans, we’ve somehow managed to fulfill our needs and create experiences with alternative fashions from those we were used to.
The figurative image depicted in Intimacy 2020 (neighbor #4), gives a glimpse into how the viewer can create an intimate moment with the window; both, the one being used as a meditational outlet, and the other being contemplated. With a voyeuristic approach, connecting us to the outside world, it creates a bond due to a globalized common experience. Therefore, others’ routines become part of our own, and an unspoken shared intimacy is created.
While the artist and the subject share similar circumstances within a geographical proximity, positioning the painting in a foreign time-space context, stimulates different attitudes from the viewers. Influenced by their own experiences and perceptions, each person’s memory transforms what is being observed, and creates, as a consequence, a new one to be stored. Light Negatives (Joseph) hand out a clear understanding of how these recollections are being contrasted. In a form of layered glass paintings, used as a way of freezing light in a certain moment, this element and its effects become part of the architecture they were lived in, and the memory of it.
These traces of light, set in a different space from where they were captured, provide the observer with a complex dimension of the self, memory and time. It all creates a synesthesia recognizing a very quiet image that belongs to another surface, while stimulated by the noise and surroundings from where the spectator stands. With light, intimacy and an empty beer bottle full of cigarette stubs as a reflection of our routines and emotions, when passing in front of these works, is almost as walking through the pages of someone’s journal on display.