Konstant schwebend _ Priska Streit & Marta Vezzoli
Installationen
17.10. – 14.11.2015

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It´s the act of hanging the works into the open space that connects them with the ones of Priska Streit. Marta Vezzoli, who today has her first exhibition in Germany, has studied sculpture at the Accademia di Brera in Milano and later worked as an art therapist. It is mainly the experience she gained from this activity that constituted her interest in the human factor of art. In her works, she has frequently worked up her own biography or the biographies of people who are close to her or she was intensively concerned with. Within these biographies, she is especially interested in the factor of time, which surely is of great importance for the lifelong prisoners that she became acquainted with during the five years of her therapeutic activity. She has worked up her experiences with those peole in the threepart piece „Sguardo sul tempo“ from 2013.

The act of sewing is a slow process that is demanding a lot of patience but on the other hand it is also kind of playful; Marta Vezzoli is regarding it as a metaphor of the passing time, during which she is able to contemplate much and long. In the compositional framework of her pieces, the strings are sometimes stitched in long widths, which could perhaps be interpreted as a symbol for the stringency of single thoughts, but sometimes they also build knots. In this way, they express the multiple and changing feelings of the artist during her work, as she says.The frame, in which the gauze is clamped, is a boundary, but a boundary that can be crossed. This fact becomes legible when we regard the references between the single pieces but also the stitches that hang out of the frame.
I think, while watching the works, it becomes obvious, why Marta Vezzoli sees an analogy to the individuality of handwritings in the abstracted and often graphical expression of the embroidered stitches.

This aspect becomes even more evident in the work „Inside from 2013, which consists of 13 pieces and which is deliberately placed in the entrance in order to encourage the visitors to walk through it. The work destillates the impressions she had gained from a comprehensive research of diary entries and letters of soldiers in WW1. Each of those soldiers thus had a different view of the war, of course, but nevertheless they all had something in common: it is the longing for the lost commonplaceness like having a shower, drinking a cup of milk or just enjoying the love of the family. While regarding these long panels of gauze as a synopsis of the letters, those soldiers sent home, the yellow rectangles symbolize the concealment of all too horrible experiences of the war.

The work „Verstohlene Augenblicke“ came into being the day before yesterday and it bears this title because – to her own statement – she should not have taken the time to do it because of the preparation of this exhibition. The fleeting and fragmentary aspect of this work is contrasted by the fact that the single elements are tied-up in a kind of netting; maybe this makes once again clear why the artist repeatedly compares her work with diary entries or sketches; formally this is expressed by the colours black and white, of course.

Each and every work is a little world, she says, which has to be discovered with the greatest attention.The „overall view“ of many works, the alleged duplication of a surface with „false shadows“ once again brings out the most important motivation of Marta Vezzoli:
Looking behind the facade and watching more closely!

Kay Brudy
October 17, 2015 (from the introduction text for the exhibition)