Artist: Zoe Barcza
Exhibition title: Goblet
Venue: Croy Nielsen, Vienna, Austria
Date: November 20 – December 22, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Croy Nielsen
Love spins in two directions. From a heart-shaped package located slightly to the left in the chest, patterns swirl, they contain words and trauma, ecstasy and the mysteries of the universe. Clockwise and anticlockwise; object choice, self help, forbidden fruits, orgasmic pleasures. The lover drifts and temporarily leaves the body like a shell. Shells are attractive spirals. Place a pebble in the shell. The lover drifts but is still present. Someone is pretending not to notice, and love returns. It’s pain to not be noticed and pain binds us to love. Poison departs from the goblet in the form of a snake coiling down the shaft.
The paintings are airbrushed, almost photographic. They depict naked bodies as well as posing, negotiation and quantification. They show what is outside, but also something about the inside, the darkness of the bellybutton, I long to enter into you. The colours are distorted.
Love threatens to consume us, to reproduce us. Shoals of fish mixing like water and milk. A double helix is unzipped and unwound. Your fractals start to merge. Use words to separate. Even I love you separates. The word is a lord that will move your body for you. Only if you know you belong to the larger order of the word will you manage to remain individual. Love makes you porous, permeable, you need to resist.
The lord has made the human look stupid. The word-lord says: we must be slaves and masters, though in our heart of hearts, our emerald box, we know it’s not true. The gestures and regulations are there because it is too real to handle. The thing that doesn’t separate, that threatens to dissolve.
We started out as tubes between mouths and anuses. Perhaps one tube entered another. The friction produced vibrations sparking bilateral symmetric growth. Arms, legs, fingers, lips. Now there are sev-eral holes in the body. Things come in and out. Tube-like parts of the body can enter and things like words and seeds can be excreted. It’s neither good or bad but feels like both.
The painter has made the man look asymmetric. We are most symmetric on the outside. In the embryo the first thing that becomes asymmetric is the heart. Two bodies next to each other make a more sym-metrical arrangement. If being symmetrical meant being complete the most perfect couple would be narcissus and his mirror image. Symmetry is useful for making sense, asymmetry is useful for dissolv-ing.
– Olga Pedan
Zoe Barcza (b. 1984 in Toronto, lives and works in Stockholm) graduated from Städelschule, Frank-furt. Recent solo exhibitions include Big Boy Pants, Bianca D’Alessandro, Copenhagen; Property Sex, Bonny Poon, Paris (both 2018); Mothers Milk, In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand (2017), Dr Awkward, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Texas Liquid Smoke, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (both 2016); and Inter-national Loner, Shoot the Lobster, New York (2015). Her work has been part of group shows at SALTS, Basel (2018); Team Gallery, New York; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (both 2017); and Cooper Cole, Toronto (2016).
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Goblet, 2018, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Zoe Barcza, Being Alone, 2018, Acrylic and vinyl paint on linen, 120 × 101 cm
Zoe Barcza, Rite of Spring, 2018, Acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas, 170 × 200 cm
Zoe Barcza, Untitled, 2018, Oil, acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas, 160 × 90 cm
Zoe Barcza, Vocabulary of Feelings: Met Needs, 2018, Oil, acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas, 160 × 90 cm
Zoe Barcza, Vocabulary of Feelings: Unmet Needs, 2018, Oil, acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas, 160 × 90 cm
Zoe Barcza, What Empowers Us to Stay Connected to Our Compassionate Nature Even Under the Worst Circumstances?, 2018, Acrylic and vinyl paint on linen, 120 × 101 cm