GROUP EXHIBITION

In conversation with two of Hollowell’s contemporaries, Sascha Braunig (b. 1983 Qualicum Beach, Canada) and Veronika Pausova (b. 1987, Prague, Czech Republic), Hollowell discovered that Kogelnik’s work had equally impacted their own practices. This exhibition will bring together works by all four cross-continental, multigenerational artists.

“Exquisite corpse” is a collaborative parlor game invented by Surrealist artists in 1925. Players take turns either writing words or drawing sections of a body on a folded sheet of paper, hiding their contributions so the next person can see and respond to only the very end of the previous work. Hollowell felt that this Surrealist concept was perfectly descriptive of how artists inspire and influence each other over time and distance.

The paintings, works on paper, and sculptures on view by the four artists in this exhibition exemplify each of their commitments to exploring the body, particularly the female body. Together, the artists form a lineage of bodily abstraction with a shared use of vibrant colors and deliberate mark making. Rather than representing the body as a stable subject, each artist approaches the figure as a site of tension, one that can be stretched, flattened, cut up, and transformed. The works shown wrestle with ideas of the body as a machine, a modular system, and a site shaped by technology, labor, and scientific developments.

As a result, feminism and the question of what it means to make a feminist image are central to this collection of works. Each artist reckons in her own way with the identity of “feminist”—from the earliest born, Kogelnik, who preferred not to be labeled as such, to the three contemporaries, who embrace the term and hold the investigation and depiction of gender and its complex cultural contexts to be central to their practices—all while working in yet another era of feminist backlash.

The visual similarities between these artists’ works are striking. Hollowell is most impacted by the way in which Kogelnik sought to blend the idea of the body and the machine, and how this composite informs a feminist critique. Pausova is influenced by the direct, unapologetic, and sometimes “violent” imagery and energy in Kogelnik’s playfully unrestrained compositional devices, encouraging the creation of “uncomfortable” works. Braunig began using the silhouette and cutouts in her practice only after discovering Kogelnik’s work, which in Braunig’s words “allowed” her to incorporate similar structures in her own paintings. Bold, emotional color connects the featured works, in which hard lines set against rendered forms and flat areas of color and pattern are created with a controlled brush stroke and, more often than not, a crisp and stylized finish. Seen as a whole, Hollowell envisions this exhibition as a playful game of exquisite corpse, in which an iconic female artist has folded the paper and passed it down to the next generation.