Tania Pérez Córdova, Melanie Ebenhoch

• 24.03.–27.03.2022

Under the title Secret Beyond the Door Ebenhoch presents a new series of paintings. Their circular shape is reminiscent of a large hat. Starting with a series of smaller “traveling hats”, Ebenhoch plays with this shape and the associations it triggers — hat, nipple, bosom, eye with pupil and iris, lens, doorknob, light switch — as well as symbolic encodings. In interplay with stylistic elements of illusionist painting, she uses signs of cinematic imagery to create irritating moments and question traditional perceptions. In her work, Melanie Ebenhoch often deals with the interactions of painterly and architectural spaces that are charged with projections of the subconscious. As in cinematic mise-en-scènes, she places pictorial effect above narration — often through the objectified female body. The examination of film and cinema has long played an important role in her artistic practice.

The sculptural compositions of the Mexican artist Tania Pérez Córdova are performative works that do not move — “contemporary relics”, as she calls them. Driven by a fascination with materiality, the artist explores the transition between the production of an object and the experience of it as an event in everyday life. Her sculptures often explore material processes as a narrative tool for examining time, identities, and places. “There is a bronze contour, which in its liquid state was poured into sand. An approximation to a real scale…” (Pérez Córdova).

In the series Contours, outlines of windows, doors, and passageways recall memories of existing rooms and spaces, redefining the position of an unknown observer. View from a Mass Protest (Contour #16), 2022 was especially produced for the presentation at Spark. The title makes a reference to the original door where the shape was taken from: the main door from the Palacio Nacional in the Zócalo Square of Mexico City, where most mass protests in Mexico end up. “I feel making work is a process of looping between the general and the personal. Climate change anxiety, political tensions, migration issues, gender politics, violence are all issues that reflect on everyday life and translate into our way of living and our rendering of the world. It is unavoidable for me to speak about these issues, but I try to address them as a personal experience, from the intimacy of everyday life.” (Pérez Córdova)