Artists

In Kata Unger’s tapestries, codes and chaos are intertwined. The woven fabric is the vehicle for a rich imagery, reminiscent of medieval worlds, where imaginary beings and humans coexist. Her approach is punk, rebel, and critical: words like slogans intrude on scenes where the beings try to float. Raft of Medusa or Noah’s Ark— struggle, sex, pain, and game are all brought together on shifting grounds or in the turbulences of a maelstrom. A struggle between romantic dreaming and bumpy illusions is carried by a delicate palette. Through the slow and fastidious process of jacquard weaving, Kata Unger patiently reflects on the world, her gaze both looking straight ahead and back.

Maria Zahle’s multidisciplinary practice includes collage, textiles, sculpture, performance, and poetry. For years, she has been creating her own dyes using natural materials and plants she grows herself: indigo, madder, linen, mignonette, walnuts, soot… Thus, her delicate palette of blues, pinks, reds, yellows, greens, and blacks is the result of a long and complex process rooted in nature and the history of humanity since ancient times. Her work highlights the body and its involvement throughout the creative process, focusing on the traces we leave on the people and spaces we encounter.

Marielle Paul’s world recalls an imaginary garden filled with shapes, curves and airy musings. With confident gestures, in bright shades of gouache or ink, the artist traces her compositions, which are neither quite abstract nor completely figurative. Whilst nature has been and remains an important source of inspiration, so too are readings, music, travel – life itself. Marielle Paul is intent on capturing the essence of it. The artist is generous in the use of her colour palette, lending her compositions an atmosphere which can be soft or explosive in turn. She playfully leads us on a journey with a vast sensory spectrum: darker notes also invite themselves into the luminous profusions. Starting from the mental herbarium of the painter, her works go beyond the intimate level, establishing a dynamic reading with universal and archetypal accents.

MEET | Ode à l’harmonie sous le pinceau de Marielle Paul au Musée Déchelette de Roanne

by Arts in the City

MEET | Les ateliers de Marielle Paul

by Martine Gonthié

Fee Kleiss is fascinated by possible links. She finds objects and waste in order to create a conversation between them; first as an attentive mediator and then as an almighty artistic director, who decides, rejects, modifies, sets and narrates. Mural installations are thus born – small still-lives or more precisely reanimated lives – and paintings with an unsettling perspective, which add or are being added to volumes, objects.

Fee Kleiss tells stories, plays with concepts and implicit words in her findings; all are questioned and diverted. The creativity is immense and brings life to a new vitality in things that were set aside, forgotten, lost. A little something can make a world. Humor, tenderness, eroticism, drama, beauty and rejection intertwine; the artist leads us along like a child who is eager to find a playmate. Observing contemporary society, its obsessions, expressions, its politically correctness… Nothing is left behind!

Weaving is the art of waiting, of a slow building through the back and forth of the shuttle through the warp. The work assembles itself section by section to culminate in a final revelation.

For Elise Peroi, the craft process and its meditative aspect matter almost as much as the work born from it. Having long hesitated between painting and weaving, she found a form bringing the two together. She first paints on silk, cuts her painting into thin straps to then weave back again, playing with planes and movements. As the threads vibrate and the wood of the loom chatters, the artists lives through a mental and sensory journey. Thus, the woven work is being created in a minimal choreography to the music of repetitive sounds. This pas-de-deux executed in communion with the material also expressed itself through performances: Elise Peroi reuses her work gestures, integrating branches and marble to the threads, interweaving herself, or performing nameless rites where seeds and soil evoke the original cycle of endless new beginnings. In this way, she extends the tangible reality of the weaves.

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen started her career as a ceramist by undermining the bases of this discipline. She developed an aesthetic of the ugly, the failure, the missed attempt. In one of her first series of work, she chose to disregard her training to excellence by integrating to her art the failed experiences of the best ceramic artists of the country. She Kills the jar, the pot, bowl and all the craft objects, to which ceramics limited itself for a long time. She undermines her discipline, and starts to reconstruct: shaky and almighty structures, tiered tempettopieces, sandcastles, heaps of found objects caught in a heavy flow of clay, foamy glazes that overflow like washing up fluid.

The works of Pernille Pontoppidan tell a hundred pieces of fascinated stories superimposed in a cadaver exquis of good and very bad taste, of baroque and minimalism, of extreme dexterity and bitter failures.

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen
“Spine has pine in it”

video, 2017

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen sculpts with a creative audacity where the primitive and the sophisticated combine. See her at Tommerup Ceramic Workshop (Denmark) as she creates a monumental work for the show ‘Grand Designs – Clever Hands’ at Clay Museum, Denmark, 3.10.2017-1.04.2018.

Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen explores the relationships between mankind and space, as well as the links between body and mind. Her work takes on multiple shapes – drawing, painting, new technologies, monumental site specific installations – and often contains a collaborative dimension. For example, she works with prisoners to conceive an artwork that will greet the visitors upon arrival or with inhabitants of an ill-reputed neighbourhood to literally shine a new light on the place.

Her projects – in whichever dimensions – are filled with spirituality and are characterized by a delicate graphic work.

Peter Neuchs’s œuvre is a contemporary interpretation of the Baroque aspiration to unite terrestrial and celestial, visible and invisible – encompassing the temporal, the perishable and what pertains to eternity. His work is characterized by surfaces filled “all-over”. It is excessively stuffed with details, sensations, and feelings.

The memento mori, a notion dear to Peter Neuchs, lies at the heart of his work : through a play on perception his blurry images interrogate our reality, our relation to matter, our existence as matter.