Unsee

Associative vortices, immersive images and delicate sculptures made from archaic materials: Susi Gelb's work combines the natural and artificial worlds and explores the intersections of reality, aesthetic experience, and artistic practice. Susi Gelb uses and combines different media and techniques, she merges organic structures with digital processes and fuses algorithms with visual strategies and and the use of specific material. Her works and installations are the product of careful compositions, but she allows unexpected discoveries to arise in her artistic process and fully embraces these serendipities. At NIR ALTMAN, she shows images arranged into videos that she has created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence. The imposing cloudscapes, swirls of water, the interplay of smoke and fire appear invigorating, associative, as if taken from an alternative visual reality. Susi Gelb has taken individual still images from the videos and printed them on large-format image carriers made of reflective aluminium. Complemented by gestural interventions on the surfaces, these digital drawings appear poetic and unreal at the same time. The sculptures on display, on the other hand, resemble archaeological artefacts; like drill cores, they bear witness to hidden layers and sediments of the Anthropocene, viewed from a possible future. Some of the sculptures hint at a certain healing effect: they exude the scent of hay, an aroma diffuser unfolds its effect and a small sand basin establishes a connection to Zen gardens. The title of the exhibition UNSEE also refers to the hope of freeing oneself from part of the daily, disturbing flood of images in order to be open to new experiences. The UNSEE exhibition creates an oscillating vortex in which Susi Gelb's artistic cosmos unfolds. In it, the artist acts as a digital archaeologist and spiritual alchemist, unravelling the layers of the universe around us and at the same time weaving them into something new. - Quirin Brunnmeier