12 Rooms
ANNA KOTT
July 2022
Galerie KEWENIG
KEWENIG’s monthly rotating exhibition programme ‘12 Rooms’ occupies the enclosed space between the gallery and the adjacent building. It regularly allows presentations of artistic positions of art historical significance and offers a platform to young talents.
The large-format drawings of the work In Between by Anna Kott, executed in 2017 in charcoal and graphite on paper, show a structure, twisted and braid, in the sequence of its depiction on three sheets in increasing movement, reduction and dissolution. Reading from left to right, the transformation of an object takes place that is only vaguely defined as such.
The initially free-standing form, which is akin to a braid, to which Anna Kott has lent depth through dark shading, loses itself in its pictorial transformation into complex, geometric and at the same time biomorphic individual forms, fanning out into a juxtaposition of harsh contrasts and blurred contours, until the drawing in the right-hand image finally reaches out to the edge of the paper and is permeated by transparencies, interruptions and openings.
"GO ON THEN" was written by the artist on the wall of the exhibition space on the day of the installation. These words suggest that the fragmentation of the motif is by no means connoted with decline or loss, but that a constructive idea of liberation and new beginnings prevails.
In this work, the transformation of a figuration, which always goes hand in hand with a certain narration, to an abstracting representation takes place before our eyes, which allows the object to linger in the visual memory, yet abandons the narrative origin in favour of a subjective, individual experience and sensation.
The decidedly painterly quality of Anna Kott's work, which is also evident in these drawings, is determined by a free gesture, by the accurate realization of her associative pictorial idea, and not least by the spatial and thematic expansion of the subject.
Text: Peer Golo Willi
