CMRK is a network of four independent institutions in Graz whose common interest lies in the conveyance of contemporary art within an international context.

Facebook

CMRK archive:
Spring 2017
Summer 2017
Autumn 2017
Winter 2017

Opening: 7. 12. 2017, 7 pm
Duration: 8. 12. 2017 – 18. 2. 2018

As part of our Winter Season we proudly present two solo exhibitions by Isabel Nolan and Ola Vasiljeva. These exhibitions are presented amidst the traces, developments and reconfigurations of the wider artistic programme.

Isabel Nolan’s solo presentation of new and recent work reimagines the vaulted rooms of the Grazer Kunstverein as a crypt or secular chapel for the disgraced Dominican friar and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno. Towards the end of the 16th century Bruno developed a mental memory system that he believed could encompass and order all knowledge of the universe. With (Tomb) Memory Wheel (2017) Nolan has reimagined an ossuary. This work is dedicated to Bruno’s memory system and his largely unacknowledged, anachronistic vision of an infinite universe where all matter, and so all people, were equally imbued with divinity and dignity. Throughout the show death and art are posited as powerful shapers of reality. Whether she is imaging the lofty thoughts of unlikely philosophers, or observing the upturned soles of funerary sculptures, Nolan’s work examines how the universe is brought into meaning in the human mind, and how the intimate nature of direct contact with the world and physical lowness can unexpectedly arrest that process of understanding.

Ola Vasiljeva’s work tells stories. Stories that belong to no single entity, but which unfold gently through objects. While walking one day in Graz, the artist encountered an enormous boarded-up 16th century building on Kaiser Franz Josef Kai. Falling in love with the door and window grates that shelter the interior from the glare of passersby, she began to develop new sculptural works that would neither hide nor reveal themselves – objects that ‘look like’, but refuse to fully commit, sitting somewhere on the cusp of recognition. Vasiljeva speaks with materials through strong lines, exaggerated features and rude shapes, but it’s the magic she conjures in encapsulating what’s absent that makes her work really sing. As part of our Winter Season the artist stages an arrangement of recent and newly produced work, to create a series of imaginary thresholds that act as guardians between one moment and the next.

Isabel Nolan, Curling Up With Reality (Tomb of the Ducs d’Orleans, St Denis), 2012–17. Photograph. Image courtesy of the artist, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna.