Adriana Czernin

• 26.04.–27.05.2006

For her third personal at Galerie Martin Janda, from April 26 until May 27, 2006, Adriana Czernin is showing large-format colored-pencil and graphite drawings. On the gallery’s upper level the artist created an in situ drawing for this show.

Instead of the intense red and pink employed in her earlier drawings, Adriana Czernin uses different shades of grey – cool color tones with metallic materiality – in her new works on paper. Form and space take on more significance due to this absence of color.
The viewer once again encounters a woman in an ornamental network. In Czernin’s new drawings the floral ornamentation which characterized her work thus far is replaced increasingly, however, by geometric forms: petals and leaves yield to forms with a sharp, hard, metallic appearance, individual elements to the infinitely repeating, ornamental structures which, as a result of multiplication, seem to dissolve.

“Abstraction away from perceived reality in ornament was originally directed towards the spiritual view of a hidden, superior order within the material world. The modernists declared war — with good reason — on banal manifestations of the ornamental as all-over, decorative kitsch. They seem to have lost this war, and to a great extent that is due to a ‘horror vacui’ which is difficult to overcome. Reversing this, so to speak, in her ornamental network of lines and structures, Adriana Czernin succeeds in presenting the ‘emptiness’ of the interim spaces as a wealth of possible insights and ways of seeing.” (Annelie Pohlen)

For the in situ drawing on the upper level Adriana Czernin combines characteristics of her work on paper with new spatial possibilities. By and large her figures have been lodged in an ambiguous spatiality; the space here is perceived as clearly three-dimensional. The ornamental framework is expanded upon as an organic, almost fluid structure, which refers — more intensely than in the past — to the mental character of the forms employed.