Verena Landau
Painting
17.10.2020 – 31.12.2020
The group of works 'in_sight' deals with places in public life where something is presented or where something presents itself. Hereby, the works tie in with Landau's longstanding painterly investigation of people in relation to architectural space.
'Landau chooses as locations for her Ein-Sichten presentation spaces in the broadest sense: public places as deliberately staged offers to perception, correspondingly charged with meaning and function: from museums to landscape architecture to botanical gardens. In the paintings, the message of the object to the figure becomes the starting point of a complex situation of observation. Landau shows how directed observation dissolves and expands into an invisible network of lines of sight and thought. Offensively or instinctively, the figures observe not only the object, but also themselves, their surroundings, their neighbor, his observation, and beyond. This triggers tensions in the pictorial event, which Landau develops into the condition and theme of the series of works 'in_sight'.' (Tina Simon in: 'in_sight. Ein Plädoyer für den zufälligen Moment und seine tieferen Einsichten', ed. Josef Filipp Galerie / Verena Landau, 2017)
In 'Römisch-germanisch' the gazes of those looking from above into the museum of the same name in Cologne meet the real people in the Coelner Zimmer. In the large-format painting 'Trompe' hanging opposite, a woman in Berlin's Neues Museum photographs old structures on a wall, wherein landscapes or maps open up...
For the adjacent space, Verena Landau has conceived and painted two new small-format picture series: 'Versprechen der Kindheit' and 'Vergessen der Kindheit'. For the former, Landau collected places of longing in a photographic search for traces. The central architectures from various epochs are pavilions and castels, but also tents and carousels. What they have in common is not a rectangular ground plan, but a hexagonal, octagonal or decagonal one. Atmospherically, these places are characterized by a picture-book-like beauty with a childlike, transfigured view of the world; in part, they are reminiscent of De Chirico's 'Pittura Metafisica'.
The second series shows analogies in terms of motifs, but here it is about places where beauty disappears. It is alienated or prevented, it is about processes of displacement or neglect. A postcard edition was created for the two juxtaposed painting series: 12 motifs in a hand-bound signed folder (edition of 30).
The edition documents both series, at the same time it is a plea for writing and sending postcards in times of an increasingly digital communication - with warm greetings from places where one has never been...
