Additive Removals

We're proud to present Additive Removals, a group exhibition featuring work by Leah Dixon, Rubén Grilo, Anja Schwörer and Verena Issel. Showing traces of production and destruction, these artists’ works bear something ruinous and unresolved at the same time. We are building temples knowing that they are going to be ruins. We are building temples to get ruins.

Leah Dixon's (*1982 Cincinnati, Ohio, USA) sculpture Wheel Apparatus gives the impression of functionality, although its purpose remains unclear at first. Colorful accents in yellow, red and shiny metal stimulate to touch— we can spin the wheels and operate a stick, as if we were having control over a vehicle. Has this apparatus been simply invented to keep the viewer busy? The raw wooden material exposes the manufacturing in what could be called a non-finito, the canonical technique, an open space that leaves the finalization of the sculpture to the next authority— and accepts incompleteness for the sake of transparence of its own process of formation. Both of Dixon’s works on view, Wheel Apparatus and Mask with Ball Gag, are united in that— via a female gaze, they satirize the dysfunctional space where the body is made to be architecture.

The surfaces of Rubén Grilo's (*1981 in Lugo, Spain) works from the series High Five Zara show abstract emulations of labor in the information society. Fashionable ornaments on denim, which originally derived from its usage for working clothes, are created with a laser that is able to remove meticulous layers of fibers, resulting in light marks on the dark textile. Grilo has developed a way to copy this highly elaborate process and creates 'manual' compositions based on actual patterns from popular street fashion brands, intertwining design ideas, work ethics, and digitalization. The fabric is stretched onto an aluminum frame with snap buttons, as if it was ready to be taken off easily, even when in a hurry.

Approaching Verena Issel's (*1982 in Munich, Germany) installation resembles the exploration of an otherworldly archeological construction site— a ruinous temple complex made of foam. This highly ephemeral material references formal characteristics from ancient times in an almost cartoon-esque way. Corrugated sheets become channelled columns, ribbons of marbled foam are coiled into Ionian capitals, and colorful plastic watering cans from typical Neukölln shops are turned into decorative amphoras. Electric plugs come at random out of some columns, breaking the composition to absurdity.

In her painting Anja Schwörer (*1971 in Kandel, Germany) uses various kinds of textiles which are processed by hand in experimental techniques. Bleachings leave patterns— the materiality is regarded in an almost sculptural sense and belabored subtractively. Destroyed pigments get washed off and reveal multiple layers in the material, which had yet been unknown. Foldings result in geometric shapes, creating abstract, often times monochrome compositions resembling photograms. The paintings might come in traditional formats but deny any oil-on-canvas attitude, as the fabrics are stretched onto frames only at the very end of her process.

Additive Removals
Leah Dixon, Rubén Grilo, Verena Issel, Anja Schwörer
curated by Annika Goretzki

Opening May 12, 2018, 7pm
The exhibition runs until May 20, 2018 — visits by appointment

Petrus Entertainment
Am Treptower Park 28
12435 Berlin
annika@petrusentertainment.net