Combined with the political regimes that commissioned them, architecture and urban planning form our understanding of space, design, and relationships. New paintings by Warsaw-based Olga Mokrzycka anchor the exhibition. Her practice unpacks Post- Communist Poland, both physically and ideologically. Atmospheric interior and exterior landscape paintings are installed alongside drawings composed on hand-made cement and gypsum bricks. As brick is the fundamental building block of for architecture, the artist deconstructs the mise-en-scene of her background through manual construction of individual units. In various formats, she rearticulates those structures forming urban landscapes that shaped her childhood. Mokrzycka allows the viewer the opportunity to view the matter and materials that inform her practice.

On an adjacent wall, ‘paintings’ of exposed canvas and acrylic reveal the way they were constructed, depicting the layout of the stretcher bars. Post-painting objects built by Oscar Berglund introduce an alternative way of looking behind the shaped-canvases made famous by Frank Stella. Historically, paintings were only valued for their surfaces, and stretcher bars had no value. The purpose of the Structure Paintings is immediately evident: the compositions communicate a humble nobility of transparency and truth.

Emi Winter’s beautifully complex rug challenges our preconceived expectations of tapestry, textiles, and abstract painting. She adds to the post-painting discourse in a manner unique to her biography. Raised by American parents in Mexico and educated in the States, Winter’s rugs merge the ancient and mythic history specific to Mexico and the polemics of painting. Theorists complain of the mediums referentiality, but Winter poetically marries the two aesthetics whilst removing the authority of the art object. Her contribution to the exhibition is functional and domestic yet conceptual. Familiar geometric elements of indigenous cultures find equal footing beside the cut-outs of Modernist abstract painting.

Influenced by her studies under Olafur Eliasson, geometric sculptures by Antwerp-based Elise Eeraerts establish the reliance of repetition as a reliable method of knowing. Simple geometric shapes repeated determine the purpose, intent, and identity of an object. Multifaceted ideas can be reduced to forms that are easy to understand.

Lastly, Texan Sydney Williams adds elements of play to the conversation. Williams has fabricated a new series of work for Art Toronto. The ceramicist hand-built clay forms inspired by children’s building blocks to form architectonic assemblage sculptures. For Williams, all artwork is born from one origin: play. As children, toys are essential to human cognitive development and emotional-intelligence. She challenges the false dichotomy that exists between toys and art objects.

Matter of Course articulates the simple language that post-conceptual artists adopt to develop a practice that appears complex. Structural elements have ideological veracity. The exhibition strives to be both democratic yet conceptual. Art that appears as non-populist is made for and made by ordinary people using apparent methods.

In 2007, Berglund graduated with an MFA from the Royal Danish Art Academy. He holds a diploma in Film Making from the Film School of Stockholm. The artist has exhibited throughout Mexico, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and in Los Angeles. In 2015, the artist participated in two residencies in Japan, Shiro Oni and Artist in Residence in Yamanashi. He is the recipient of numerous Danish Art Council grants. His works are found in collections throughout Europe and Mexico. The artist lives and works in Mexico City.

Elise Eeraerts holds an MFA from Sint-Lukas University College of Art and Design in Brussels. In 2011, she was subsequently awarded a Master Scholar diploma from the Institute fur Raumexperimente in Berlin. She has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout Spain, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, Finland, and Japan. In 2016, she was awarded a yearlong residency at Casa de Velasquez in Madrid, Spain, and she won first place in Land Art Division from the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice. Recent shows include Our Mathematical World and No Blossom, No Moonlight both in Belgium, the Celeste Prize exhibition in London, and SAMPLE curated section at Zona Maco in Mexico City. In April 2017, Eeraerts mounted her first American solo Surfaces at CYDONIA, Fort Worth.

Olga Mokrzycka holds an MFA in Stage Design and a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She has exhibited in exhibitions throughout Poland, Germany, Hungary and in different cities in North America including Seattle and Dallas. The artist is regularly commissioned to design stages for theatre performances throughout Poland. Her most recent exhibitions include Mere Formality at Galerie Labirynt in Lubin and Young Poland: Afterimages of Reality at the Museum Ludwig in Budapest.

Emi Winter is a painter who works with textiles and printmaking. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bard College and received her BA in visual arts from Oberlin College. Her work is included in the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de México; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños; Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca; Museo Nacional de la Estampa, México; Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Portland Museum of Art, Oregon. In 2011, she was awarded the acquisition prize in the XV edition of the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial in Mexico. In 2017, Winter was curated in American Genre: Contemporary Painting by Michelle Grabner at Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA in Portland, Maine and in Homecoming at CYDONIA, Fort Worth. The artist lives and works in New Jersey and Oaxaca.

Sydney Williams holds a BFA in Ceramics from Texas Christian University. CYDONIA hosted her first solo exhibition in December 2016. The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas.

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Warsaw-based Alicja Bielawska states she not believe in mistakes; mistakes delineate her practice from that of industrial design and mass production techniques which influenced art of the 1960’s. Her drawings, collages, and sculptures insist on a collective memory. The past is not a constraint. The past can function as common ground to connect with the viewer. If we can find common ground, we can negotiate shared possibilities. Our origins can be the same so we can share new ideas.

Intuitive drawings made with colored pencils provide a mental architecture and share a basis for her sculptures: colorful, ribbon-wrapped shaped metal rod forms or metal constructions formed for customized textiles made to define its space. Bielawska’s works bridge-build the conceptual gap from the second to the third dimension. For her, sculpture begins with height and width. Depth is a natural extension, uniquely tied to drawing.

As a single act is repeated, it creates a pattern. Patterns enable one to experience a sensory vibration, a type of rhythm, becoming ingrained within an individual, subjective universe. Canadian painter Caroline Mousseau’s disciplined practice produces an aesthetic functioning as an impasse between painting genres. Some works appear as abstraction; others look post-minimalist, and some appear to be modernist in inspiration, with obvious geometric design. Mousseau’s different methodologies create beautiful, lyrical, textured, optical surfaces; her dried, paste-y, oil paints physically and visually yearn for her viewer.

When we return to the beginning, the sense of possibility is most intense. In the exhibition, mistakes are reframed. Simple gestures, repeated, accumulated value. We can understand mistakes as another opportunity to pioneer the future in a manner that these different artists do: mistakes are another chance to do right. The show feels fun, filled with color, and packed with visual stimulation and thoughtful investigation.

CYDONIA is proud to present programming supporting emerging female artists in context outstripping our previous generations’ gender concerns. The concept and aesthetics begin and end with the work.

 

Alicja Bielawska graduated with an art history diploma from the University of Warsaw and the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. She also studied at Central Saint Martins in London, UK. The artist is the recipient of numerous grants and scholarships including the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, Mondriaan Fonds of The Netherlands, and Young Poland. In 2013, the Modern Art Museum of Warsaw commissioned a large-scale work from Bielawska, that is now part of its permanent collection. In 2015, she was a finalist for the esteemed Views by Deutsche Bank award. In 2016, she was also a finalist for the prestigious Polityka magazine award. This year, she has two solo exhibitions, Labirynt Gallery in Lublin and Kasia Michalski in Warsaw.

Caroline Mousseau graduated as the valedictorian of Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2012. She studied at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2010. Mousseau has exhibited throughout Canada, and in 2014, she was curated in the exhibition 100 Painters of Tomorrow, with an eponymous book launch, in London and New York. The artist was met with strong Canadian support for her solo presentation at Art Toronto 2016. In 2017, Mousseau will participate in her first museum exhibition, ab NEXT: Contemporary Abstraction by Emerging Artists, at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and she returns to Texas to mount her second solo exhibition with CYDONIA.

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In whirl, Mousseau’s develops a rich, midnight black background before stacking on the taupe abstraction. The glossiness of the oil paint which grounds the canvas exhibits movement, echoing the top layer of repeated, arabesque loops, creating a more dynamic experience for the viewer.

Her methodology produces a new tension that straddles the space between the past and present. The structure and malleability of the medium is appropriated and co-opted by the artist to bring viewers up to this moment in time.

Caroline Mousseau graduated as the valedictorian of Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2012. She studied at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2010. Mousseau has exhibited throughout Canada, and in 2014, she was curated in the exhibition 100 Painters of Tomorrow, with an eponymous book launch, in London and New York. CYDONIA is extremely proud to announce a year of programming with all female artists, as Mousseau will mount her second solo exhibition with the gallery in 2017.

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Warsaw-based Mokrzycka-Grospierre’s works occupy one side of the booth. Her background in set design informs her painting practice. Each object exists as mise-en-scene, defined by perspective and space. Elements are assembled and disassembled to create a sense of foreground and background, never referencing traditional landscapes. Instead, they function as micro-political negotiations between the communist architecture and life post-1988, when Poland collapsed its prior government and turned towards capitalism, opening the country to new opportunity, wealth, and freedom.

Travels to faraway locations and studies of surrounding architectonic structures of a region inform Glaswegian Bronwen Sleigh’s work. Her drawings collapse and then expand traditional visual perspective. Two colorful reconfigurations of Barcelona’s Olympic stadium demonstrate new ways to understand the motives behind design for the masses. Recently, Sleigh ventured into 3-D work. In Lac Eigen I, a small aerial sculpture, shaped linear structures undermine and escape the traditional frame, whilst remaining composed.

If art is function-less and architecture is functional, how does one define the objects in the Space and Place? Seattle’s iconic Space Needle embodied the era’s faith in the future and technology, in exploration. Can works about architecture embody the utopian ideas the original architects originally designed? How much of the architect’s original vision remains? Examples of photography, painting, drawing and sculpture from around the globe present possible answers.

Julieta Aguinaco’s paintings encapsulate elements of time. The rising Mexican star incorporates man-made structures which serve as markers of human civilization. Aguinaco’s works are devoid of human form, yet she depicts the physical impact of humanity through the monuments they construct.

Lastly, Swedish-Mexican Oscar Berglund’s photo documentation of the recent past and modern ruins provide insight into the ways things once were. It is impossible to remove architecture from history. When we look at ruins, we discover the ways in which they were originally constructed. Examining the decay of monuments is an archaeology that provides answers to how we might live tomorrow.

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