ART-PRESENTATION: Karin Schneider-Situational Diagram

Karin Schneider’s work has a strong play impulse and sometimes invites the audience to invert the logic of the WORK bringing functionality to it. Her architecture models were transformed critically into domestic apparatus, her oil paintings became exhibition displays for projections. There is always a program inserted in her installations in order to connect the work with the present tense and with the reality outside the exhibition space.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dominique Lévy Gallery Archive

Karin Schneider’s solo exhibition “Situational Diagram” takes as its point of departure a series of monochrome paintings structured in reference to the artistic practices of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko as they developed after World War II. 16 black monochrome paintings are installed on the gallery’s second floor in a “Trisected square” steel architectural structure, built in reference to the black-on-black squares that characterize  Reinhardt’s paintings. Paintings from this group can only be acquired by collectors with the agreement that another artist will at some point alter the canvas by painting over its surface. The name of the other artist is not to be revealed to the buyer prior to acquisition. On the second floor is a 16 mm film of the Adriatic Sea projected from a wood and Plexiglas “Transparent partition”. On the third floor are two “Splits”, works referencing Newman’s “Onement I” (1948) and “Stations of the Cross “(1958–66), and a large “Void” work referencing a painting at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Also on presentation are a series of paintings cataloguing the exhibition’s various blacks, a “Cancellation” work that simultaneously combines and annuls two artistic styles and their corresponding sets of values within one painting and an “Extraction”.

Info: Dominique Lévy Gallery, 909 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration 7/9-20/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.dominique-levy.com