Aus: Zimmer Nr. 3 (There Is Nothing But Time Time)

Marie Letkowski (*1984) Aus: Zimmer Nr. 3 (There Is Nothing But Time Time) 30.10. - 25.11. 2022 www.marieletkowski.com —— Marie Letkowski investigates in her artistic work the physicality and performative aspects of painting. She develops concepts that examine the relationship between body and painting, painting and space, and the relationship between their production, (re)presentation, and perception. In her artistic practice she build so-called Zimmer installations, in which she wants to put single paintings into a concrete physical and mental dialogue with the actual bodies in the room. Each Zimmer therefore builds on several paintings and a theme and is always expandable in terms of painting. Marie Letkowski has been working on the painting series Zimmer Nr. 3 since 2016. This series is a long-term project that branches out into various sub-themes and exhibitions and is always changing. The first project Aus: Zimmer Nr. 3 (We Can Ignore It It) took place in 2016 in a New York hotel room, wherein she surrounded herself with the paintings for three days together and continued to work with and on the paintings during her stay there. In 2017, she exhibited Zimmer Nr. 3: Interruption for the first time in her Berlin studio. In doing so, it was important for her to take the space of the creation of this work, the studio itself, as a starting point. The third exhibition, Aus: Zimmer Nr. 3 (Whose Body Is No One’s One’s), took place in a small gallery space in Brooklyn, New York City in 2018. Each exhibition of these works represents a brief interruption in the circulating movement of the paintings. In them, Marie Letkowski take her own body and her personal working conditions as an artist as a starting point, incorporating the factors of interruptions and daily influences of her artistic work into the creative process. In this series, she explores the possibility of appropriating qualities of the human body to the paintings, thereby enhancing the provisional potential of a painting and transforming it into something ephemeral. The painting formats move within her body dimensions, the painterly process is constantly in flux and is meant to be shown in its various stages of work. Since 2018, she has been working on many individual paintings over and over again within this series. She changes them regularly, washes them out, overlays them with new motifs, links, writings and notes, and washes them again. These paintings are documents of their own mutability and part of the painterly cycle of this series. Thus Marie Letkowski can literally penetrate the material of the canvas with her thoughts, writings and motifs. Currently on view at feldfünf in Berlin is the installation of the fourth part of this series, the continuing exhibition Aus: Zimmer Nr. 3 (There Is Nothing But Time Time), which on the one hand invites us to relax, remember and pause, and on the other hand expresses the absorption, processing and channeling of information, and in it thematizes forgetting and the perception of our own physical presence. This form of the process, in its constant movement and deformation, is used by Marie Letkowski here as a figure of thought, in order to be able to discuss and experience an individually applied confrontation as openly as possible. Questions related to material, condition, movement, body and text play an essential role for her, as well as questions about the medial itself. Sound artist Simon Berz distorts and transforms voices and sounds heard during the opening into a sound work, which can now be heard as part of the exhibition.