OFF BEAT

Karolina Albricht

OFF-BEAT

JGM GALLERY

Karolina Albricht

OFF-BEAT

24 february - 27 march 2021

JGM GALLERY Published on the occasion of the exhibition by JGM Gallery 24 Howie Street London SW11 4AY info@jgmgallery.com Catalogue Design: Alice Wilson Photography: Damian Griffiths ISBN 978-1-9160585-7-6 © 2021 JGM Gallery and the artists All rights reserved

Opposite: Abs Around (detail), 2020. oil, sand, horsehair on jute, 30 x 26cm

No.3 (The Sheriff), 2020. oil, sand, jute on canvas, 30 x 26cm

We have been working with Karolina for almost 3 years now and I feel privileged to know this “powerhouse” of a woman and have this opportunity to observe her practice – a practice literally bursting with action and constantly demanding new ground.

Karolina’s own energy lights up the room and her ambition and dedication is a pleasure. I am thrilled to bring these works to JGM Gallery for her first solo show OFF-BEAT and a “stunner” to open the gallery for this positive new year, 2021 .

Through the emotive titles and Scott McCracken’s essay, Karolina has given us a real glimpse into the physicality of her work.

During my final studio visit to her late last December, I was blown away by these paintings – a magic experience, where each time my eyes settled on a work another was revealed.

My attention was racing from the large canvases to the tiny ones where you may expect there to be some loss of intensity or restriction of the composition. To the contrary - I found my eyes darting from one work to the other, and finding in each, a powerful response.

One of the great pleasures of running and owning JGM Gallery is the close and enriching relationships forged with many artists. I really can’t wait to spend more time with Karolina’s paintings where they will have the space to establish their true merit and deserved importance.

Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi January 2021

Play It Again: Karolina Albricht’s Recent Paintings

by Scott McCracken

Karolina Albricht’s paintings have a capacity to contort their own space, splintering into mismatched, often competing areas. Each shape takes up one assumed position among many, where the awkward angularity of shard-like appendages penetrates through a nebulous sub-terrain. In works such as Eyeball Straight and Knuckle Rotation, the spatial relationships between elements are distinct and intelligible; forms and planes interact and overlap into a readable positive and negative space. And yet negative space is never treated as inactive space. It is always positively charged. It carries and sustains the painting over the entire surface plane, into each of the four corners, along each of the four sides and, sometimes, even extending across its own edge. Other pictures are altogether more spatially amorphous where we are presented with camouflaged forms and indeterminate textures spread out equally over the entirety of the surface.

In No-Face Floating, a lithe and stickly orange ‘branch’ extends diagonally from the top edge of the picture, quickly dissolving and disappearing behind some orthogonal shape composed of short, sharp, black flickering marks of charcoal and oil stick. Veils of translucent paint are contrasted with built-up abrasions, forming unified passages that lead us from one point of the painting to another. These routes of travel are sometimes straightforward, sometimes turbulent. No Face Floating, like many of Albricht’s works, is situated somewhere between a terrain and an atmosphere; of something that has to be traversed but at the same time submerges us into a compacted and condensed space.

Airless.

These are pictures that take their time to materialise. There is a slow, almost geological build-up of matter, adhering into a Frankenstein’s Monster-type assemblage, patchworked together from innumerable parts. This agglomeration of substances includes not only paint (and its handling), but also pumice, hair, sand and bits of discarded studio detritus.

It creates a surface that is dense, coarse and scarred. We are presented with different consistencies; hard (like bone or enamel), stretched (like tendons), taut (like musculature).

Bodily references are also to be found in the titling of the works: Abductor Straight, Kneecap North, Spleen Roll. Paintings that have torn out their own vitals and then stitched themselves back together, embodying a type of reanimation, where each individual part is given a necessary role to play in how these function as paintings – through a vital excess.

Eyeball Straight, 2020. oil, sand on jute, 30 x 26cm

The smaller works appear to be able to withstand more attack. These are pictures that have been relentlessly ‘hit’, again and again. And hit hard. It is only through these continuous strikes that they have developed a ‘thicker’ skin. A skin that is blistered, grazed and calloused, one that has fortified itself against such assaults. They have a resistance and a stamina. An endurance. The smaller paintings bear the brunt of a targeted aggression, a forcefulness that has been channelled into a pictorial and material form. Evidently these hits are not random, but strategic. Across this group of paintings, Albricht’s formula of juxtaposing anatomical parts with specific actions, manoeuvres or Cardinal directions renders these titles as instructions to be followed, as physical movements or locatable positions alluding to exercise poses, dance moves and surgical procedures. As we look at them and consider their respective titles, we start to identify how the depicted forms are enacting these instructions as we, simultaneously, envisage our own bodies, our own limbs, engaging in similar acts.

While the titles are amusing in their own right, the paintings themselves have an underlying sense of humour that filters through only after sustained looking. Understated humour in overstated paintings. It’s not immediately obvious but nothing about these paintings is obvious. That’s their point. Soft Dock is an example of where the painting’s innate sense of humour is more forthrightly conveyed; the trailing ‘golden hair’ that skirts along the left edge of the canvas while the red-lipped letter-box shaped mouth, an orifice, could excrete, swallow or inhale at any moment.

From within the paintings themselves, and as viewers from outside, there is an unabating desire – and temptation - for touch. The tactility indirectly points towards a type of intimacy; there are indications of the sexual and the erotic but this is never made entirely explicit.

What is explicit is that everything we see has been handled, moved, felt. All of the works possess quite subtle, tender moments of painterly facture. These are paintings that have been committed to and, through this uncompromising commitment, something is slowly revealed.

Professing and confessing all at once, they are propelled by a haptic (and visual) curiosity. In Upward, Not Northward and Some Come Up isolated tapered extremities, possibly fingers or claws, float through their interior space. All the elements circulate around each other, closing in on the centre - a point of pressure within the painting.

While looking at Albricht’s work, our focus is not only on the surface of the painting, but above it and around its perimeter. Philip Guston and Charline von Heyl have each made remarks about the space in front of the picture plane. In the case of von Heyl, she describes paintings as hovering in front of themselves. A similar thing is happening in Albricht’s paintings, where the interiority of the picture distends, spilling outwards as well as laterally.

Collaged canvas creeps over the edge, breaking the conventional rectilinear ground

Opposite: Soft Dock, 2020. oil, volcanic rock, jute, hemp fibre on jute, 220 x 180cm

Eyelid Flaking, 2020. oil on panel, 30 x 24cm

suggesting the thing we are looking at is only a fragment of something larger. These irregular edges reinforce the surface as something approaching a slab, or a tablet, that bears a lively interplay between drawn inscription and pure material sensation. In the larger paintings, such as Upward, Not Northward, Soft Dock and No Face Floating, areas of exposed jute, are left untreated, occasionally collaged on top, providing Albricht the opportunity to continually have her paintings be in a state of flux, where any pictorial decision or move made can be countered and played again.

There is a fullness to these works. A fullness that satiates our appetite for when we look at a painting. Often it is the case that overworked (and underworked) paintings are just a different type of ‘worked’ and this seems to be the territory that Albricht’s paintings occupy. Their vitality, dynamism and this sense of fullness, finely tuned across both the diminutively scaled paintings and larger works, often comes directly from this excess, from being overloaded and continuously reworked. In other instances, it is not through excess, but through an adamant restraint that the resolved paintings emerge. We can compare these paintings to that of a crucible. Rather than being the typical metal vessel, however, these crucibles are flat planes and, although their materials are not being subjected to extreme temperatures, there is still a sense of melding, of transmutability, of fusion. A place where elements are forged into some new and unexpected arrangement of shape, colour and surface. Crucible also has another definition; it is a trial or a test of faith. Albricht’s paintings are an affirmation of such a test, of submitting oneself to a specific process, one that relies on an openness to possibility, to be willing to take the paintings to their breaking point in the pursuit of constructing something that has real weight, solidity and potency.

Grease It/Spray It, 2020. oil, volcanic rock, hair on jute, 220 x 180cm

Abs Around, 2020. oil, sand, horsehair on jute, 30 x 26cm

Incisor Northward, 2020. oil, sand on canvas, 30 x 26cm

Mind-Bending Machine, 2020. oil, pumice on canvas, 86 x 71cm

Bone Marrow, 2020. oil, volcanic rock, sand, hair on canvas, 86 x 71cm

Deeptime Atomiser, 2020. oil, sand, sawdust on canvas, 220 x 180cm

Glutes Under, 2020. oil on jute on panel, 23 x 16cm

Lats Reverse, 2020. oil on jute on panel, 23 x 16cm

No-Face Floating, 2020. oil, volcanic rock, hair on jute, 220 x 180cm

Knee Cap North, 2020. oil, pumice on panel, 30 x 24cm

Quads Northward, 2020. oil, pumice, sand on panel, 30 x 24cm

Two Flicks, 2020. oil, sand, volcanic rock on canvas, 86 x 71cm

Square Peg, 2020. oil, pumice on canvas, 86 x 71cm

Some Come Up, 2020. oil, pumice on canvas, 220 x 180cm

Knuckle Rotation, 2020. oil on jute on panel, 23 x 16cm

Elbow South, 2020. oil on jute on panel, 23 x 16cm

Pelvis Pause, 2020. oil, sand on jute, 30 x 26cm

Abductor Straight, 2020. oil on jute, 30 x 26cm

Upward, Not Northward, 2020. oil, pumice on jute, 220 x 180cm

Karolina Albricht

Karolina Albricht (b. 1983 in Krakow) is a London based artist and curator. She graduated with an MA from The Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2008, prior to that she completed Socrates-Erasmus at ArtEZ Institute of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands in 2007. In 2020 she finished Turps Studio Programme in London. Her recent exhibitions include Dear Painting at Nordic Art Agency, Malmo, Adazzle at JGM Gallery, London and Catamaran at Thames Side Studios Gallery, London. Her awards include ArtGemini Prize, Tyson Awards (selected by Liz Gilmore). She was shortlisted for RA Summer Exhibition, Threadneedle Prize and National Open Competition.

EDUCATION 2020 Turps Studio Programme, London, UK 2008 MA Painting, Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland 2007 Socrates-Erasmus at ArtEZ Institute of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Off-Beat, JGM Gallery, London, UK 2017 The Unknown Land, Vinarius, London, UK SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 Reflection, JGM Gallery, London, UK 2020 Artists on the Radar (online), Viewing Room, JGM Gallery, London, UK 2020 Dear Painting, Nordic Art Agency, Malmo, Sweden 2019 Adazzle, JGM Gallery, London, UK 2019 Glass Cloud Fundraiser, London, UK 2019 Works on Paper: Of the Landscape, online exhibition JGM Gallery 2019 Catamaran, Thames Side Studios Gallery, London, UK 2019 Time Flies Like the Wind, Fruit Flies Like Bananas, The Art Academy, London, UK 2019 We Can Only Have Fun on Certain Days - Stour Space, curated by Warbling, London, UK 2019 Black Stuff, Unit 3 Projects , London (co-curated with Matt Lippiatt) 2019 Make Me a Sacrifice, JGM Gallery, London, UK 2018 C’est de la Peinture, curated by Gareth Kemp and Nick Sykes, Bankley Gallery, Manchester, UK 2018 Paper Cuts, curated by Kristian Day, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK 2018 Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Unit 3 Projects, London, UK (co-curator with Sara Dare) 2018 Summer Exhibition, curated by K.B. Stowe, The Concept Space, London, UK 2018 Marching Through the Fields, curated by Warbling, Jeannie Avent , London, UK 2018 Third Order, Unit 3 Projects, London, UK (curator) 2018 ArtRooms Fair, Melia White House, London, UK 2017 Winter Salon, curated by Victoria Howarth & Paula McArthur, Rye Creative Centre, Rye, UK 2017 31 Celsius, curated by Paul Carey Kent, ASC Gallery, London, UK 2017 As It Stands; Unrefined, Muted, Abandoned. Hundred Years Gallery, London, UK 2017 Small is Beautiful More and Less, Unit 3 Projects , London, UK (co-curator with Jillian Knipe) 2017 Arcadia, curated by Curate: ART|ROOMS, London, UK 2017 Antennae, Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes Gallery, London, UK 2015 ArtGemini Prize, Menier Gallery, London, UK 2014 Now in Reverse, Hundred Years Gallery, London, UK 2014 Secret Art Prize, Curious Duke Gallery, London, UK 2013 Arte Laguna Prize, 7th edition, Venice Arsenale, Italy 2008 ASP Degree Show, Palac Sztuki Gallery, Krakow, Poland AWARDS 2020 Tyson Award selected by Liz Gilmore #artistsupportpledge 2018 Shortlisted for Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition, Edinburgh, UK 2016 Shortlisted for the 20th National Open Art Competition 2015 Shortlisted for Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition, Edinburgh 2015 Winner of the ArtGemini Public Choice Award, ArtGemini Prize, Menier Gallery, London, UK 2015 Shortlisted for the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2013 Shortlisted for the Threadneedle Prize, London, UK 2013 Finalist: Arte Laguna Prize, 7th edition, Venice Arsenale, Italy

JGM GALLERY