Tania Pérez Córdova, Svenja Deininger

• 08.02.–12.02.2023

ZⓈONAMACO Sur, curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas

Galerie Martin Janda is showing Tania Pérez Córdova and Svenja Deininger at ZONA MACO 2023.

The sculptural compositions of 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.

“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)

In her paintings, Svenja Deininiger works in layers and coatings of colours and materials, repaints and uncovers. The visible surface of a painting is the result of the many underlying layers which often become visible at the edges as overlays, coats of skin. Sometimes, an unexpected line or drawing appears on the image area, consciously placed as a memory of a previous idea. “At play here is a sense of one thing, one reality, constantly meeting another. It happens within the compacted drama of a few centimeters of painting, and it happens when you view Deininger’s practice as a whole.” (Martin Herbert)

Deininiger’s painting is experimental in its process — with errors and shifts in direction considered as an integral element — yet precise and calibrated in its formal results. “My paintings are very concrete. I am not trying to find new ways of expressing but looking for my own language, using all the languages we know. My work is neither abstract nor evidently figurative. For me, painting is a kind of language. The goal is that all those who find themselves in front of a painting have a very concrete feeling and must invent a word to express it.” (Deininiger)