Artist: Ester Fleckner
Exhibition title: Slow Tools
Curated by: Heinrich Dietz
Venue: Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Date: September 16 – October 29, 2023
Photography: Marc Doradzillo / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Freiburg
Note: Exhibition’s handout is available here
How can pictorial abstraction be used as a tool for queer ways of knowing, for queer politics? Ester Fleckner mostly works in serial woodcuts. Through this timeconsuming technique, in the physical confrontation with the printing block, Fleckner enters into processes that are characterised by unpredictability, errors, and loss of control. Instead of following a linear, result-oriented approach, Fleckner works with repetitions, revisions and transgressions.
In their exhibition Slow Tools, Fleckner presents earlier works including sculptures together with new printworks in the ongoing series Woodbeds, brimming. Whilst geometry describes bodies and spaces with mathematical precision, Fleckner cuts and moulds simple geometric shapes allowing moods, rhythms and collisions to emerge. In Woodbeds, brimming composititions are formatted like texts or code, arranged into lines that stagger, vibrate and layer – some characters even fall outside the frame. Fleckner’s alternative language of shapes indexes bodies, spaces and distances, while engaging in a dialogue with conventional language systems, as an invitation to read, write, think and feel differently. Fleckner suggests that the prints can be thought of as text portraits. Poems. And beds.
Slow Tools is Fleckner’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
