Valerie Krause at L21 Gallery

Artist: Valerie Krause

Exhibition title: 0º / 90º

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: March 14 – May 15, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

The horizontal from a vertical view

One definition of space describes it by its expansion in height, width, and depth. This can also be applied to a single sculpture or an installation of several sculptures in a space. Among other properties, the spatial orientation of a sculpture is essential to its character.

For a long time, I have been concerned with the subject of vastness, distance and expansion in sculpture. Something that expands in front of or next to the viewer and has more to do with the landscape than with the classic concept of statues.

However, it is not about illustrating a landscape, but about something that we associate with certain peculiarities of the landscape, both in a spatial and metaphorical sense: extensions, directions, distances, places, locations, levels, proportions.

From the vertical perspective of an upright body, I associate the concept of landscape with the horizontal, something that takes place in front of or next to us. Even if we find us located in a landscape, it is always in front of us, wherever we look we can
never locate the place of the landscape itself, because it’s not a fixed place, but always extending further. There is something beyond reach.

A rhythm in a horizontal form has a completely different effect from that in the vertical, by passing, it has more to do with walking and movement.

However, the horizontal carries also something passive, dormant, subject to gravity, wanting to let something be or even wanting to overcome it.

The sculptures in this exhibition are dealing with this relationship in space: the horizontal from a vertical perspective, which unfolds its effect through the contrast of the other. They are fragments, like sections of the space, which together form a whole in their rhythm, and modify the space by their position.

Valerie Krause (Herdecke, 1976) lives and works in Düsseldorf. She was formed at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and has had solo shows at galleries like Greta Meert, Brussels, Rolando Anselmi, Berlin, L21, Madrid and Mallorca, Galerie Holtmann, Cologne and recently at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne. In her group exhibitions we find places such as KIT Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstalast Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Recklinhausen, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, among others. She has received the prize for New Talents by Audi at Art Cologne. Her work is part of public collections like the contemporary art collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Konrad Adenauer Siftung in Italy or the Collection of NRW.