Amanda Ziemele: Lazybones
Natalia Hug Gallery, Cologne
November 17, 2021 - January 29, 2022
With Lazybones, Natalia Hug Gallery presents the first German solo show by Latvian artist Amanda Ziemele, whose works will also be featured in the gallery’s booth at Art Cologne 2021.
Taking inspiration from Cologne’s medieval town center with its Cathedral and twelve Romanesque churches as a globally recognized landmark, Lazybones uses the motif of “Frau Welt” as an orientation to the meanings of form in intellectual and artistic creation. The allegorical figure, occurring frequently in medieval literature, can be seen as a reference of contrasting sides: Seen from the front she is beautiful; when she turns round, her back is a mass of decay, maggots and creatures.
For Lazybones, Ziemele uses the figure’s omniscient smile as a point of reference for her workgroup of abstract paintings. The shapes are spread around the gallery space, hiding in corners or conforming to the walls. Ziemeles “Frau Welt” features brightly colored parts of organs and creatures, revealing the layered architecture of her body and inner form. Changing their appearance, the repulsive back seems to create a certain relation to the soft shapes of her paintings in Lazybones.Within the process of abstraction, the artist changes original materiality and characteristics: One can, in direct confrontation with the paintings and in correlation to the harsh image of “Frau Welt”, see how objects react to one another due to their figurative physicality, moving between representation and abstraction.
Amanda Ziemele’s works explore these abstracted layers of painting-processes and their changing creation of reference and meaning: In showing these relations, she dissolves all clear sides, making them even partners of form, color and materiality.
Amanda Ziemele (1990) is a Riga based artist who keeps her artistic practice open for all kinds of explorations. She is interested in formal qualities of painting, as well as the ideas and contexts surrounding it. Ziemeles practice is highly influenced by site-specific settings. As a result, interventions are formalized through the medium-specific peculiarities whereby the spatial and aesthetic experience is mediated via humorous strategies inviting the paradoxical. Ziemele has participated in various exhibitions and art projects in Latvia and internationally. In 2021, Ziemele received “The Purvītis Price”- Latvia’s most prestigious artist Award, with her exhibition on view in the Great Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. She has had several solo shows including: Neunauge, (Gallery NEMO, Eckernförde, Germany, 2019/2020), Quantum Hair Implants (Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia, 2019), Fish with Legs (former elephant stable of the Riga Circus, KVADRIFRONS, 2018/2019), Being like a Sponge (CANDYLAND, Stockholm, 2018), The Crocodile Dilemma (Gallery 427, Riga, Latvia, 2016).
Text written by Marlene A. Schenk
