Artist: Jessica Warboys
Exhibition title: Neap Tide
Venue: Kunstverein München, Schaufenster am Hofgarten, Munich, Germany
Date: May 10 – June 26, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein München
From 10 May until 26 June, 2016, Kunstverein München presents Neap Tide — an exhibition by Jessica Warboys in the Schaufenster am Hofgarten.
Painting is a ‘wet’ medium, and Berlin and Suffolk-based artist Jessica Warboys elaborates this property with her ongoing series of soaked Sea Paintings. She lays large sheets of canvas on the beach, applies pigment to their sea soaked surfaces, and then casts the canvases back out to sea. While seemingly abstract, the images that result record the intimate and transitory interaction of her own movements with the confluence of the canvas surface, the pigment, and the tendencies and flows of the waves, wind, salt, and sand.
Warboys journeyed to the seashore to produce this work during ‘neap tide’, a semi-monthly interval where the difference between high and low tide is at its least. Relinquishing her aesthetic control to the movements of the sea, the Sea Paintings also register the specific place and time of their manufacture. They function like a form of photography. They produce a sort of implicit cinema.
For the Schaufenster, Warboys has developed a new display apparatus for her Sea Paintings, which alludes to proto-cinematic moving panoramas and the loops of film stock. The mechanism will be turned incrementally, without advanced notice, generating a new rhythm distinct from the temporality of her initial process. The effect is a wave of painterly information that proceeds over time, a picture that is always imperceptibly changing like the cyclical flow of the tides.
For the opening event, Warboys and artist and musician Morten Norbye Halvorsen presented a sound performance and DJ set in the foyer that further accentuated the looped logic of Warboys’ exhibition.
