Christina Kruse: Base and Balance Catalogue Preview

Christina Kruse Base and Balance

Christina Kruse Base and Balance May 30–July 25, 2019

833 Madison Avenue, Third Floor New York, NY 10021

www.HelwaserGallery.com

Table of Contents This publication accompanies the exhibition Christina Kruse: Base and Balance organized by Helwaser Gallery, New York from May 30–July 25, 2019.

Foreword Christina Kruse: Balancing Act by Glenn Adamson

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Heads and Bodies: Geometry and Allegory in the Works of Christina Kruse by John Zinsser

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Balance and Dynamics by Joerg Trempler

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Interview with Christina Kruse by Joerg Trempler

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Works in the Exhibition

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Installation Views

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Biographies

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Additional Credits

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Foreword Christina Kruse: Balancing Act An artist friend of mine once told me she hated Picasso. I asked her how that could possibly be, and she replied, “he used up all the good ideas before anyone else could get to them.” An overstatement, obviously. But one worth reflecting on, particularly if the point is generalized. To be a modernist was to be in constant breathless encounter with the new: abstraction, utopian politics, the path-breaking idioms of Cubism, Constructivism, Dada, and De Stijl. So much happened so quickly. Looking back at this heroic era, it can sometimes seem that we are late to the party—by a good century or so.

What we have instead is critical distance: the wisdom that comes with a retrospective view. We know, for example, that some of the greatest visionaries of the period were too little recognized at the time, simply because they were women: Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp. And we know that the modernists’ most radical dreams were destined to remain just that, dreams. The aestheticization of society along avantgarde lines never came. Instead, today’s artists are faced with massive complexity and complicity, which can seem to overwhelm any sense of forward progress. So how does an artist do justice to the modernist legacy, while also remaining true to our own times?

The works of Christina Kruse provide one answer. They bear the full weight of the 20th century past, yet withstand the whiplash cross-currents of the 21st, maintaining their balance all the while.

reads, If the distance between head and feet with shoes become too great, one is in danger of losing the very important serious perspective. These acts of ambiguous self-portraiture culminated in 2013 with Kugelmann, a 600-pound construction somewhat resembling a giant plumb bob. Loosely based on a German toy called a Stehaufmännchen (literally, “little man that stays upright”), Kruse could wear it like a dress and tip forward, backward, and side to side, all the while remaining vertical.

It’s an apt metaphor for rolling with the punches of history.

Kruse’s newer works continue these themes, placing them at once into more orthodox formats (autonomous sculptures and drawings) and more intricate spatial arrays.

She has said that the drawings could be interpreted as portraying the internal states, psychological or otherwise, of the three-dimensional constructions. As the other authors in this publication note, these sculptures owe a certain debt to the modern conceptions of the Bauhaus. But there is much of 2019 in them too, evident in Kruse’s determination to keep them poised in perfect balance despite their own endlessly ramifying complicatedness. In this respect, these latently figurative objects may be seen as characterizations of a kind. They are not necessarily portraits of Kruse, but of us all—and where we’re at now.

—Glenn Adamson The goal of keeping her moorings on unstable ground has long preoccupied Kruse.

Between the years 1996 and 2007 she kept what she calls a Reisebuch, a “travel journal,” through her own internal experience. Comprising hundreds of pages, it has served as both foundation and quarry for her art ever since. It is filled with images of Kruse herself, variously cut up and costumed and absurdly extended through drawing and collage, floating in contingent space. On one page, she holds a metal cone to her mouth, speaking to nowhere; a caption asks, can you hear me now? On another, she sits atop a wall in a green clown wig, her legs quadrupled in length. The caption

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Heads and Bodies: Geometry and Allegory in the Works of Christina Kruse

by John Zinsser Christina Kruse constructs physical realities from philosophical questions.

The artist’s varied practice of sculpture, drawing, and painting re-adopts and re-invents traditions from European early modernist geometric abstraction.

Yet, Kruse always returns to the human figure as her primary subject matter: heads and bodies are constructed—and then deconstructed. For her, this is more than a formal investigation; it represents a larger inquiry into the role of the individual in society. The expression of the human condition becomes a struggle of form, often reduced to planar condition. The palette, likewise, conveys elemental essentialism: black, white, grey, red, silver, bronze.

Kruse, an independent artist working in the 21st century, has chosen our current crucible moment to address and re-contextualize the very foundational tenets of modernist ideals, to ask what such definitions could mean to us now. The precedents are striking. Parisian Francis Picabia (1879–1953) first showed in New York at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in 1913, almost exactly a century ago. His mechanomorphic diagrams such as Fille Née sans Mère (1916–18), depicted humans as erotic machines, perhaps preparing us for the rise of technology in our personal lives. For Oskar Schlemmer (1988–1943), the influential German Bauhaus professor, his rendition of bodies as perfect geometric armatures reflects societal choreography; the body as “body politic,” a Utopian citizen shown within the dynamics of Euclidean spacetime motion.

Importantly, this was also the historical moment in which women artists were inventing new realities of autonomous female self-identity. Such genderbased radicality was often achieved by working in a hard-edged geometric style. This is a visual language of shared universal empowerment. Geometry carries inherent authority—an absolute clarity and intent of purpose. From this perspective, both Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) and Hilma af Klint (1862– 1944) may now be cast as proto-feminist icons, establishing new notions of the role of women as artists in society.

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Among artists from the recent era with whom Kruse shares an affinity, Louise Bourgeois moved more into a territory of surrealism and psycho-sexual exploration. Like Bourgeois, Kruse personalizes her investigations of archetypal forms. It’s an extension of the Freudian model of analysis: that essential biographical truths may be revealed through ritualized and repeated selfexamination—this is where Kruse’s extreme discipline of daily studio practice comes into play.

The works in this exhibition, completed mostly over the last two years of intense activity, began in earnest with Kruse’s Kugelmann sculpture of 2013.

This large-scale kinetic work was first conceived, the artist recalls, “as a performance with the human figure—in this case, my own.” Like Schlemmer’s rotational ballet-dancers, Kruse set out to make an idealized form. This would become a vessel that she herself planned to occupy. In the resulting work, a large metal round-bottomed base was filled with weighted ballast, then tapered vertically to a slender dress-like bodice, all uniformly black in color.

Once firmly strapped inside, the artist became “one” with the surrounding shell.

The initial idea was to produce a video documentation, with herself in the role of the maker and performer. Struggling against gravity, the artist becomes a kind of hero/anti-hero protagonist. During the filming, Kugelmann tipped back-and-forth, while always remaining upright. Kruse recalls, “I was going to build a sculpture whose only function was to be challenged—or to be the challenger.” The performance also has to do with bringing the self, quite literally, into the object. Here, Kruse, in bodily orchestration with the sculpture, began to occupy what she defines as “The Third State.” It’s her version of a psychological construct that harkens back to Picabia, who envisioned fleshand-blood individuals re-fashioned for the mechanized modern world. “You have a human force, a machine-made force—and they’re both looking for balance,” Kruse elaborates.

Christina Kruse To grow, 2019 Charcoal, pen, and varnish on paper 31 7/8 × 29 7/8 in. / 81 × 76 cm

Kruse’s sculptures continue to explore bodily definitions, but now through the relationship between the central form and its pedestal base. These two distinct elements are often conjoined—or made discrete from each other.

It’s much in the art historical manner of Constantin Brancusi’s anthropomorphizing of these traditional components. In Head 6 (2017), an eyeball-like sphere is supported by a tilting angular directional vector, which juts upward

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Christina Kruse Head 10, 2017 Ink, acrylic, wood, pencil, paper, and tape on paper 10 3/4 × 8 in / 27.3 × 20.3 cm

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from a squared plinth. The suspended sphere is also bisected, and cut away, so that a viewer gets a sense of seeing both the outside and the inside. Symbolically, it is the external self and the internal self, revealed at once. Uniformly colored a monochrome coal black, the silhouetting effect in surrounding negative space is as important as the positive volume itself.

In Head 3 wb (2017), the cubistic elements—base, central hemisphere, rotational bracket, curved frontal lens—are differentiated materially and by distinction of color: white, black, grey, brown. The resulting reading is sculptural in the traditional sense, but also resembles an anatomical model found in a doctor’s office or science classroom. Here, Kruse is making allusions to function. In the German Bauhaus tradition of Schlemmer and others, “form follows function,” which becomes a kind of aesthetical beauty on its own terms. Yet for Kruse, that definition goes on to serve a larger, almost ethical role. She sees “a beauty of purpose.” Her thinking becomes informed by the methodological component of her own studio practice. She elaborates, “There’s this odd little contradiction when you set out to physically build a piece of art: the construction’s function is to support their being. And in my case, because it’s a sculpture, you cannot take that away. You have to integrate it.”

If there is a choreographic aspect to Kruse’s sculptures, it more often has to do with site-specificity. Detached (2019), is an assemblage cast in bronze, with a wooden shovel appendage. The work hangs from the ceiling, resembling a human arm coming down from a shoulder socket, its hand-like blade pushing out into the space around it. The form becomes an implied physical gesture. With the choice of bronze as its medium, the work gains metaphorical gravitas. (The natural viewer association reference here would be: classical statuary, the monumentalizing of the body, heroicness, etc.)

Christina Kruse Head 3 wb, 2017 Acrylic, graphite, wood on paper 8 × 8 in. / 20.3 × 20.3 cm

Much different in scale and temperament are the Collection of Miniature Models, 10-15 (2015–2019). Many of these were made as working studies, “maquettes,” in the true sense of the word. They are lovingly pieced together from wood and wire and paint. Most have been pulled apart and re-assembled over time, examined for possibilities for later larger-scale works. Once finished, you can still pick them up, and manually manipulate them, like a toy.

They are generative, displaying an exuberant myriad of formalist possibilities.

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Assembled together on a shelf, these small works become a spirited cast of “characters.” Art historically, they also clearly refer to Alexander Calder’s The Circus (1926–1931). This tableaux, adored by children and adults alike, emphasized the importance of play and fantasy in contemporary art. Calder’s figures come alive in both the mind of the maker and the mind of the viewer.

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Likewise, Kruse’s graphic output, Select Drawings (2013–2019), seem to occupy another universe entirely. Using traditional drafting tools such as a compass and a straight-edge, the artist’s diagrammatic drawings look like the obsessive musings of an inventor of robots or a visionary costume designer (imagine Leonardo da Vinci attending the Bauhaus). Despite their seeming casualness, they are among Kruse’s most authoritative and appealing works.

journals image

What informs the artist’s choice of using drafting tools in making her drawings?

A glimpse into Kruse’s persona may be gleaned, as she told me, “I will not not have a perfect circle!”

Not shown in this exhibition, Kruse’s paintings Select Paintings (2014–2015) remain strongly within a sculptural definition, although they are on canvas and stretcher-bar supports. This results from the artist’s choice to use linen tape as a surrogate for oil paint. Tape has the tactility of paint, and also its latent ability to describe architectonic form through hard-edge application. Yet, as a hardware-store purchased commodity, the linen tape remains the literal physical thing itself, a true readymade.

In each of these paintings, a colored isolated square element is “locked” into a kind of “track,” suggesting rectilinear directionality and movement. Kruse explains the allegorical connotations: “I call them Anordnung, which is translated to English as ‘an arrangement.’ But in German, it also means ‘order.’ To me, there is always this flow of anordnung, because there are so many places that you could put yourself into. And in my paintings, you see a solitary ‘figure’ embedded into a track, with different possible locations along that track. It’s an implied movement.”

A look into Kruse’s background frames the personal and autobiographical aspects of her work. She was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, a northern port city. She describes her childhood as one spent in the glories of the outdoors, horseback riding and in communication with nature. At the same time,

Christina Kruse Reisebuch 1-5, 2008 Artist book, 254 pages, ed. 425.

12 × 9 1/4 × 1 1/2 in. / 30.5 × 3.8 cm

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Christina Kruse Head 5, 2017 Graphite, acrylic, and wood on paper 9 × 8 in. / 22.9 × 20.3 cm

Christina Kruse Head 4 wb, 2017 Graphite, acrylic, and wood on paper 9 × 8 in. / 22.9 × 20.3 cm

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Christina Kruse Head 6, 2017 Wood, acrylic paint, lacquer, wax, and varnish 19 × 10 × 12 1/2 in. / 48.3 x 25.4 x 31.8 cm

from girlhood, she recalls being fascinated by buildings and the people that inhabit them, obsessively making drawings of these subjects. Leaving home at an early age, she traveled extensively in the US and Europe, keeping diaries and sketchbooks while learning photography along the way, before ultimately settling in downtown New York in the mid-1990s. In recent years, becoming a mother to her son, she has traveled between the city and a studio that she built for herself in Kerhonkson, New York, in the Hudson Valley. It is here that she works on her large-scale works—and has, at last, established her mature artwork.

Kruse manages to advance our understandings of modernism without relying on the foil of irony. Although she quotes from select canonical figures, there is no feeling that Kruse is an “appropriation artist.” She is discovering new ways to find personal meaning in forms that resonate with us on different levels, moving towards re-invention and re-affirmation. As a contemporary artist largely self-taught and self-aware, she shows us how much there is that came before us that can be considered freshly, resulting in new realities of what is yet to be. ◊ All quotes are taken from an interview with the artist at her home in New York City, October 2018.

4/1, 2017. Wood, acrylic paint, lacquer, brass, and wax. 18 1/2 × 7 × 7 1/2 in. / 47 × 17.8 × 19.1 cm

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Detached, 2019. Sculpture of wood, bronze, acrylic paint, wax, varnish, on bronze rod. Sculpture: 16 × 8 × 12 in. / 40.6 × 20.3 × 30.5 cm. Rod: 51 in. / 130 cm

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Biographies Christina Kruse (b. 1976, Germany) is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist who works across the fields of photography, painting, and sculpture. Her ongoing body of sculptural works combines bronze, marble and wood in standing arrangements that reference geometry.

Although grounded in structure, balance, and stability, Kruse’s sculptures nevertheless evoke similarities to the human head and face, drawing connections between rationality and the oftentimes more capricious side of human life.

Previous significant works include Dystonia (2013), a three-part performance work where Kruse confronts the instability of the human-lived experience. Getting into a purpose-built aluminum sculpture calibrated to automatically right itself after being pushed, Kruse allows herself to be taken along by the movements of the sculpture as it struggles to stay upright in the face of multiple pushes and forces from all sides. Her earlier photographic and collage works draw on her personal biography, often deploying self-portraits layered with tape, watercolor, ink, and other media in her formal compositions.

Kruse’s artistic practice thrives on the notion of construction—that a work of art can necessarily be produced out of multiple elements that fit and connect with one another. Kruse is a recipient of the GLAAD award for Best Emerging Artist in Photography (2005). Her works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, France, Austria, and Germany, amongst others.

www.christinakruse.com

John Zinsser is a New York-based abstract painter with a long career of exhibitions in the US and Europe. He studied art history at Yale University and co-founded the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1987. He has written extensively on exhibitions and is a lecturer at The New School, where he has taught for over 20 years.

Joerg Trempler is a professor of art history at the University of Passau (Bavaria, Germany).

In 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar for the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. He recently curated the exhibition Nature Unleashed. The Image of the Catastrophe since 1600 (2018) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany.

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Additional photography credits:

Exhibition curator: Junni Chen Catalogue editors: Junni Chen, Grace Hong

Christina Kruse, Matrose, 2019 Wood, oil, acrylic paint, metal, ink, wax, and varnish

Catalogue graphic design and typesetting:

36 × 5 1/2 × 10 1/2 in., cover

Landau.nyc

Christina Kruse, Figure 1, 2016

Printer: Printon Printing House

Acrylic paint, pencil, ink

Typefaces: Messina Sans and Messina Serif

10 × 8 in., p. 6

Paper: MultiArtSilk 150 g/m2

Christina Kruse, Reisebuch 1-5, 2008

Edition: 150 copies

Artist book, 254 pages, ed. 425 12 x 9 1/4 x 1 1/2 in., p. 13

ISBN-13: 978-1-7338706-1-0

Photography by Rob Kassabian

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907339

Christina Kruse, Controllable, 2018 Pencil, acrylic, charcoal, varnish on paper 9 1/2 × 9 in., p. 16

© Helwaser Gallery, New York. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

László Moholy-Nagy, Konstruktion IV, 1923

without the copyright owner’s prior permission.

Color lithograph on smooth wove paper, ed. 50 23.4 × 10.9 in. / 59.4 × 27.8 cm, p. 18

All works by Christina Kruse are reproduced with

© Moholy-Nagy Foundation

permission of the artist.

Christina Kruse, To expand, 2018

© 2019 Christina Kruse. Courtesy of the artist

Wood, actylic paint, milk paint, lacquer, metal, and varnish

and Helwaser Gallery, New York.

18 1/2 × 7 × 7 1/2 in., p.20

Photography by Phoebe d’Heurle

Photography by Nicolas Kern All installation views courtesy of the artist and Helwaser Gallery, New York.

Photography by Phoebe d’Heurle

Helwaser Gallery 833 Madison Avenue, Third Floor, New York, NY 10021 www.HelwaserGallery.com +1 (646) 476 7760 Tuesday – Saturday: 10AM – 6PM