up against the line – 2021

Press release:

In this exhibition, Janine Magelssen presents site-specific works, wall reliefs, works on paper, and sculptural constructions. The artist’s work takes drawing as a point of departure in a quest to understand form and its related concepts. In her reduced idiom, convex and concave elements serve to create forms, volumes, spaces, and surfaces. These the artist defines through the use of shadow, light, line, and empty space. Reduced and toned down to a minimum, this visual language can lead to an encounter with silence. What this silence implies depends on what the viewer brings to it from their own background and visual experience. Tactility is central to Magelssen’s art. Her works activate perception, stimulating the body’s senses, allowing the viewer to relate them to the human body and the physical space by means of subtle impressions.

“Drawing is fundamental to my artistic practice. The tactile aspect of the line and the properties that enable it to evoke visual forms and voids are essential. I work with drawing both in a spatial three-dimensional context and as a direct expression for the perception of space, sound, light, and temperature in daily notational drawings on paper and in slower, more time-consuming drawings.

“The exhibition will consist of both site-specific works done directly on the wall in the borderland between drawing and objects or reliefs, and between free-hanging spatial constructions and drawings on paper.

“In the exhibition setting, these enter into dialogue with each other, forming constellations that evade linguistic interpretation. Instead, they activate the sense of space and give the viewer what I would call an experience of abstraction.”