ART COLOGNE 2024

Günter Brus (*1938 – †2024 in Graz)
with
Anya Belyat-Giunta (*1975, lives in Lyon, FR)
Zenita Komad (*1980, lives in Austria)

The proposed collaboration “Writing Through Drawing”builds off Günter Brus’ concept of the “Bild-Dichtung”, which roughly translates to ‘Picture-Poems’, as both Image and text are created through the act of drawing. A synthesis of language and image, in which the two forms of expression are not mutually dependent. The text does not explain the image and the drawing is not an illustration of what is written. Brus’ inspiration and guide was William Blake’s „illuminated manuscripts“ which became the model for his own drawings & writings.

For Art Cologne, we join Brus’ literary approach to drawing with 2 emerging artists from the gallery program who also use image/text approaches to their work. Exhibited works will be framed works-on-paper by Belyat-Giunta & Komad and will maintain a similar format to Brus.

Komad created the floor work “Missa Solemins” in Berlin (2010), and recently adapted it for an exhibition at Kaiservilla in Bad Ischl (AT) in cooperation with the gallery. The piece uses an abstract floorplan of a church which is adaptable to any space. For Art Cologne– we propose an context-specific version of “Missa Solemins” as a vinyl graphic or carpet- that would unify the booth until a singular space. The tile is a Solemn Mass composed by Ludwig van Beethoven from 1819 to 1823.

Anya Belyat-Giunta works only with drawing, her images hover between reality and myth, past and present, matter and the invisible, the word and the figurative, she traces a mirror-line where the unknown is reflected in shifting faces. When using text in her drawings she often shifts between Russian and English, perhaps the languages she dreams in…

Both Belyat-Giunta and Komad’s drawings and collages- are full of bodies and the psychological dreams/traumas which contain them-circling back to Brus’ earliest performative Actions. Much like a building in “Missa Solemins”- the body is a sacred vessel containing a multiplicity of histories and symbolism.