ANDREA GARCIA VASQUEZ I VALENTINA PLANK IFRANZISKA REINBOTHE

ANDREA GARCIA VASQUEZ I VALENTINA PLANK I FRANZISKA REINBOTHE Galerie Laetitia Gorsy - She BAM! presents a selection of works of Franziska Reinbothe, Andrea Garcia Vasquez and Valentina Plank. Each artist explores the relationship between humans and the environment in her own way, using traditional and contemporary artistic methods to visualise and question complex issues like environement, ecology, formalism, materiality and identity. - Andrea Garcia Vasquez works with a diverse mix of traditional and contemporary artistic methods to explore and visualise complex human and non-human relationships. Inspired by anthropocentric phenomena, her sculptures and installations challenge common notions of nature and culture, particularly colonial, white, capitalist and binary concepts. Andrea uses a wide range of materials and techniques in her creative work, including weaving, embroidery, quilting, knotting, ceramics, welding, video, 3D modelling, animation, photography and printing. These multidisciplinary approaches allow her to experimentally illuminate and reinterpret the human perception of the environment from a non-human perspective. Her work questions the complex tensions, dependencies and symbiotic connections that define human positions in ecology. She explores how art should capture and represent the environment in times of environmental degradation and reflects on the aesthetics of natural phenomena, such as the grace of a majestic mountain. Andrea’s art opens up spaces for reflection and critical engagement with the dynamic relationships between humans and the environment in modern society. Andrea Garcia Vasquez, born in 1992 in New Jersey, USA, currently works in both Germany and the USA. She obtained a course certificate in Geology from the University of Alberta via Coursera in 2021. Her academic background includes a graduate degree (MFA) in Installation and Spatial Design with Joachim Blank at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany, from which she graduated with an honourable mention in 2020, and a Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 2010 to 2014. Valentina Plank’s artistic practice is characterised by an intensive examination of material and form. Spatial sculptural installations meet an ar- ticulated interest in exploring the panel painting from a sculptural perspective. At the centre of this is the playful investigation of specific physical properties of objects and their materiality, as well as their relationship to each other and their presence in space. Classical sculptural questions are renegotiated using their own means - industrial materials such as steel pipe arches are re-contextualised, organic wave forms are created from compressed packaging materials such as cardboard and heavy steel sheets are stretched with wire rope to form a walkable composition of line and surface in space. Various combinations of different materials and found objects create an archive of objects that can be continuously reassembled and yet form a cohesive sculptural installation. Plank at most partially blurs traces of individual elements by processing their surfaces, for example. In this way, those elements retain an independence that outlasts new contextualisations in space. An immediacy can be discerned that also invites the viewer to empathise with the work process. The question of the inherent logic of things and their handling and the most obvious solution is closely interwoven with Plank’s processual practice. It is always about the confrontation with the real. Valentina Plank was born in Austria and currently lives and works in Leipzig and Halle. She completed her main-studies in sculpture/metal at Burg Giebichenstein, Kunsthochschule Halle (Saale), before specialising in sculpture/materiality & space. She previously studied photography and media at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig and art history and philosophy at FAU Erlangen. Franziska Reinbothe’s works challenge the viewer to question conventional viewing habits by resisting a habitual, consuming way of seeing. Her art deconstructs the relationships in the image in order to create new identities at the same time. As a visual artist, her work is concerned with various strategies of image finding within painting. She is particularly interested in what normally remains hidden: the back of a painted picture and its edges. She makes these aspects visible by compressing canvases, exposing stretcher frames or dispensing with these elements. Her ar- tistic process involves stretching, folding, breaking, cutting and/or sewing pictures after the painting process has been completed. She sees her work as a dynamic pictorial laboratory without restrictions and relies on making in order to explore new possibilities. Reinbothe’s art operates in an area of indeterminacy in which actions and coincidences are realised simultaneously. She does not think in terms of images, but bases her working method on a pictorial way of thinking in which actions with different image parameters are meaningful. For her, the process of creating a picture is not completed with the painting of a canvas, but also includes the processing of support constructions, picture edges and colours. Her interventions can only be planned and controlled to a limited extent, as she takes into account the potential inherent in the material. Franziska Reinbothe studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (HGB Leipzig), where she graduated in 2010 with a diploma in painting/visual arts with the grade «Very Good». She continued her studies with a masterclass at the same institution from 2010 to 2013. Her works are represented in renowned collections such as the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany, the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.