Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Milena Dragicevic, Chin Tsao

• 20.06.–19.07.2024

From 21st June until 19th July 2024, Galerie Martin Janda is showing the group exhibition Loops and Fangs with works by Milena Dragicevic, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler and Chin Tsao.

“Loops are things we all make whether in handwriting, in painting, politics or in other aspects of life. The end is connected to the beginning. And fangs pierce. So one could say they are opposites, but they need each other. They not only need each other but they recreate each other in a way.” (Milena Dragicevic)

In her paintings, Milena Dragicevic uses a bricolage of gathered imagery, painterly processed, dissected and abstracted, to produce forms which are fused with swaying outlines from intuitive drawings. The abstract forms emerge to distinguish structure within the continuous space of the canvas and even evoke the passage of sculptural notions, before dispersing again into the background. This relationship of tension is heightened by the artist’s use of bold colour, which alternates between anchoring the forms onto the canvas and suspending the backdrop. More Like Air Than Land (Frieda), 2024 is part of a new series of large-format horizontal paintings.

“Dragicevic is not a flashy gestural painter. Her technique is, if not quite matter-of-fact, resistant to flourish; it doesn’t draw attention to itself but instead, appropriately, seems to render, sincerely convert. What she paints feels to have passed through some kind of filter, though also as if the artist were suspicious of ornament. Amid this, one aspect that serves to richly complicate is Dragicevic’s use of colour, which is not descriptive, not tied to the things she renders — we’re already not sure what they are — but something physical; it steers the compositions into moods, ambiguous and composite ones that feel less like statements than further questions. Amid this, there’s a double bind in play: a sense of wanting to relay something coherently, without the caprices of false memory, but also a haptic suggestion that the thing visualised is only an imperfect echo.” (Martin Herbert)

Chin Tsao’s works encompass video, ceramics/porcelain, music, performance and creative writing. She explores the distinctive characteristics of different media and harnesses the inherent expressiveness of every one of them to evoke inexplicable perceptions and associations. Her creations embrace a sense of chaos and kitsch, jumping across historical eras while incorporating elements of Eastern and Western aesthetic forms.

“As for Tsao’s video works, The Land of Promise trilogy encompasses a diverse range of digital technologies to create a captivating visual experience. She incorporates elements such as shaky, low-quality footage captured with handheld cameras, composited special effects, and high-quality cameras that vividly and intensely portray the body and flesh. The use of different video styles and technologies adds layers of complexity and depth to the storytelling, creating a visually stimulating exploration of queer identities and the transformative potential of digital mediums.” (Meiya Cheng)

EUTOPA is the third sequence of the video series The Land of Promise. The title of the work is an ambiguous play on words between “Europa” and “Utopia”, referring to Jupiter’s moon “Europa”: one of the most potentially habitable planet for humans.

Connecting, interweaving and linking are terms that play a central role in the work of Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler — including in their drawings, which are usually created in a collaborative process. The artists often draw on references from art history, literature, philosophy, architecture, natural science and social theory and combine them with their own motifs.

The sculptures from 2008 shown in the exhibition seem frozen in their movements. They are figurative, dance-like steel sculptures of filigree lightness that linger between stasis and dynamism. “We are interested in translating this standstill in motion into a material that is inherently rigid. Words and sentences are carved on discs and strips inside the objects.” (Irene Hohenbüchler)

These seemingly frozen movements are reflected in the drawings. Strange creatures, some with several faces or three legs, stand closely intertwined in stage-like spaces.