06.10.2016 - 04.12.2016
ANOUK GRIFFIOEN – NAVIGATING THE IMAGINARY
ANOUK GRIFFIOEN
Anouk Griffioen’s exuberant, life-sized charcoal drawings come to life in one enormous total work of art in which flora, fauna and human figures flow into each other to form a surreal world. She responds to new digital developments by using techniques such as video mapping for her drawings, and in doing so she takes her traditional art practice onto new roads. The exhibition is curated by Mariette Dölle, director KRANENBURGH in Bergen (NL).
For over fifteen years now Anouk Griffioen has been working on creating a distinctive oeuvre of monumental charcoal drawings, which she sometimes works on for months in a delicate hand. Griffioen’s drawings are characterized by their dream-like aesthetics, in which the observer literally feels overrun by nature. Her black and white panoramas of mysterious animal and plant kingdoms evoke a sensation that balances between a beneficent experience of beauty and a sense of foreboding.
Navigating the Imaginary
In the exhibition, Griffioen presents both new and recent work. The installation Navigating the Imaginary takes centre stage: a twenty-two metres long charcoal drawing, which Griffioen has been working on intensively over the past two years. For the passers-by in the Witte de Withstraat, this immense work functions as an enlarged diorama. From the street almost nothing can be seen; Anouk Griffioen’s rich world of ideas unfurls itself through only one narrow window.
Aside from drawings, Anouk Griffioen also presents the video sculpture Flo, in which a girl wanders through a drawn space. This romantic tableau is projected onto a cube by means of a special video mapping technology, whereby we are absorbed into her perception of the world.
In the work Foliage (2016) the visitor stands opposite an immense, almost impenetrable foliage which comes to life with the visitor’s every movement within the space, due to motion sensors. A major leitmotiv for Griffioen comes to the fore in a series of portrait drawings in which human figures enveloped in sheets and blankets are depicted. Are they hiding themselves, or, to the contrary, are they about to reveal themselves? Better than anybody else, Griffioen knows how to capture the precarious balance between secrecy and transparency, between stillness and motion, in her mysterious work.
In the exhibition, Griffioen presents both new and recent work. The installation Navigating the Imaginary takes centre stage: a twenty-two metres long charcoal drawing, which Griffioen has been working on intensively over the past two years. For the passers-by in the Witte de Withstraat, this immense work functions as an enlarged diorama. From the street almost nothing can be seen; Anouk Griffioen’s rich world of ideas unfurls itself through only one narrow window.
Aside from drawings, Anouk Griffioen also presents the video sculpture Flo, in which a girl wanders through a drawn space. This romantic tableau is projected onto a cube by means of a special video mapping technology, whereby we are absorbed into her perception of the world.
In the work Foliage (2016) the visitor stands opposite an immense, almost impenetrable foliage which comes to life with the visitor’s every movement within the space, due to motion sensors. A major leitmotiv for Griffioen comes to the fore in a series of portrait drawings in which human figures enveloped in sheets and blankets are depicted. Are they hiding themselves, or, to the contrary, are they about to reveal themselves? Better than anybody else, Griffioen knows how to capture the precarious balance between secrecy and transparency, between stillness and motion, in her mysterious work.
Anouk Griffioen
photos by Sander van Wettum
