Press Release

Martina Fischer:

BEINGS/WESEN

Exhibition: February 5 - February 26, 2004.

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 5, 6-8 p.m.

NEW YORK – Globe Institute Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Martina Fischer, opening February 5th and continuing through February 26th, 2004. The exhibition, titled BEINGS/WESEN, will feature eleven recent paintings, oil and acrylic on canvas. This is the artist’s first solo exhibit at the gallery. Martina Fischer is based in Meersburg, Germany.

Der Vogel Macht (Bird Called Power), 55 inches high and 59 inches wide, is a topographic depiction of spherical surfaces within a space that is defined by volumetric and shaded fields of acute yellows, blues in manifold tones and other colors. The curvilinear edges of fields within this picture plane become rectilinear and diagonal in various instances. These edges at once radiate from and merge into a centric visual space, generating a plateau that is at times lucid yet remains ultimately obscure on its representational mode. The optical textures present on these topographic surfaces are suggestive of a virtually microscopic detail of an organic creature that is both minute and Kafkaesque in its cellular and metamorphic vectors. Here is an organic system that is a sum of hills, valleys, luminosity, and darkness, occupying, defining and being defined by its own spatial realm.

The “thousand plateaus” in these works suggest a web and a network of surfaces, masses, beings, colors, spaces and thoughts that continue to define each other through both visual forces and fragilities that expunge lexical finalities:

A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers ... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Masumi, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 6-7).

In Fischer’s paintings, parts of plants seem to represent BEINGS/WESEN, as much as illusions of spatial entities are themselves biomorphic abstractions. Within this painterly realm, indistinguishable details of arthropods are aggregations of spatial territories on their own rights.

For further information, please contact Raphy Sarkissian at T 212.349.4330 ext. 110, or visit: www.martina-fischer.de.tt