Adriana Czernin

• 20.01.–25.03.2023

Galerie Martin Janda is pleased to present the seventh solo exhibition of Adriana Czernin between 20th January until 25th February 2023.

With her new works Adriana Czernin radically expands her intensive engagement with ornaments. Although in terms of content she builds on earlier groups of works, she frees her new drawings from the format of the self-contained work cycle. Starting from various source patterns, she understands their transformation as a challenge “creating irritations and breaks.” So Czernin follows this path consciously and systematically.

Some of her new works feature salient geometric bodies conflicting with soft, almost living forms, while others show abstract forms wildly wedged together. Vulnerability, camouflage, resistance, forms covered and forms hidden, organic beings and their counterparts — there is a constant oscillation between foreground and background. Soft meets hard, fragile meets stable, delicate meets crude. These contrasts yield new constellations, which in turn generate tense and ambivalent scenes.

Crucial to these new works are the spaces in between the motives. They are not empty, but establish fields mutually defining each other. Each space has its own meaning, both as an independent entity and as a demarcation and definition from other spaces. Thereby the artist creates a kind of dense matter, whether it is flowing or appears a as geometric form, whether it shows itself as a thing or as an apparent background.

Themes such as threat and protection, which have already characterized Czernin’s work so far, are now no longer evoked by anthropomorphic figures or bodies but by geometric or amorphous shapes evoking diverse associations.

Lajin VII (2021) features floral ornaments winding around a geometric grid in front of a blue background. Both motives originate from a medieval pulpit, a so-called minbar, in a Cairo mosque. An uncontrolled, flowing and freely moving jumble wraps around the intertwined, shiny metallic lattice structure.

The drawing Jam II (2022) shows an amorphous body, jammed into an irregular geometric shape, against a purple background. The motive is “something animalistic, fleshy, partially mangled, and frayed bearing something like a head or a body or both” (Czernin). Emerging from flowing paint, these shapes create an associative surface standing in stark contrast to the monochromatic background.

Five tetrahedrons are the origin of the drawings featuring Platonic solids (Tennantit, 2022). The ideal regularity of these complex forms poses something challenging, for their distortion alone leads to irritation. The artist detaches individual elements from the tetrahedrons, so that all forms collide and dynamically interact. Despite the resulting breaks we are still able to intuit the form’s clear underlying geometry.