The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present the first major institutional solo show of Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz, whose work has aroused attention in the international art scene following presentations in Manifesta and the Berlin Biennial in 2008, as well as the Swiss Institute Venice and the Art|Basel Statements in 2009.

The exhibition No Core operates on a meta-level within the gallery space, creating a parallel territory of reflection on the figure of the body and the awkward encounters between its mental perception and physical expression in space. It brings together new and specially commissioned work into an integral repetitive set, including photograms, spatial installations, sculpture and the premiere of a video.

Whilst basically Pamela Rosenkranz’s œuvre walks a tight conceptual line, the artist’s practice features a lightness of touch, that belies the use of irony, play and humor in its making. In general, Rosenkranz’s works speak of a mercurial élan, an “inform” physicality and a pervasive sense of “mise en scene”. These distinct but intertwined notions frame the artist’s practice, directed to ponder upon a contemporary understanding of nihilism. Indeed, she investigates the possibilities of reducing the meaning of an art work down to its limit, converting her pieces into mercurial paradigms, where meaning slips through the fingers of those wishing to apprehend it. To do so ROSENKRANZ arms herself with immaterial parameters, such as reflections, repetitions, infinite loops, voids, crossings and obliterations.

Nothing Unbound (2009), for example, is a spatial installation consisting of human sized mirrors arranged in a cross-like circular structure. The mirror has been a powerful mediator of identity explorations by conceptual artists in the 1970s. Nothing Unbound harnesses together a multiplicity of reflections, in a looped journey which denies the viewer ever being able to grasp their mirror image fully. Like other works by the artist, in «Nothing Unbound » the viewers experience a nervous reality, as embodied by the art work. One which is unstable and open, and which darts restlessly between presence and absence.

Rosenkranz develops a disturbing and unromantic approach to understanding the relation between body and mind. For her, the traditional separation between thought and emotion is redundant. Several free standing paintings on shield-like canvases have emerged from the artist’s view on contemporary psychology. Made from translucent hand-moulded plastic, the expressionistic motifs on these new works are dealt with ironical distance.

Recent findings of neurology propose that the common view of psychology must yield to what is known amongst contemporary neuro-psychological thinking as “Eliminative Materialism”. The latter establishes that there is no such thing anymore as a psychological truth, or even a true self. Works such as the new video As One (2010) weave together observations of minute details in the face of Michael Jackson, with isolated gestures and unfathomable movements of the pop star in order to multiply all possible viewpoints and incorporate this very notion of Un-identity mentioned above. In so doing Rosenkranz also negates the very notion of the centrality of the artwork and its meaning.

A catalogue will be published in early 2011, in collaboration with Kunstverein Braunschweig. Pamela Rosenkranz will have solo shows in Kunstverein Braunschweig in December 2010 and the Swiss Institute New York in early 2011. 

Curated by Katya García-Antón