Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to present the first London solo exhibition of German artist Ina Geißler. The Berlin based painter is widely known for her complex, technically skilful and sensually appealing compositions of convoluted spaces. Yet for the first time, and in line with the gallery’s focal point in drawing, a wide selection of works on paper will be shown alongside her accomplished paintings.
Ina Geißler’s spatial compositions explore the boundaries between the perception of space and its abstraction. The artist’s work moves between an allusion to existing places and their negation.
Geißler builds her canvases like an architect revealing a tendency to become more abstract in her recent paintings. Strips of tape serve as framework during the creation process. Geißler uses them to confine the surfaces painted in muted egg tempera and reveal the layers beneath after they have been removed.
The contrast between complex architectural spaces and sensual painting demonstrate the particular appeal of the painter’s oeuvre. Essentially abstract, Geißler’ s canvases are nevertheless earthed.
Geißler’s painting series “Einsicht” (insight) unveils a realm of spaces detached from reality. It seems as if one looks at a building from above, the roof lifted off and the storeys beneath gleaming through. Stairways, fragments of railings, flights of windows, and even materials such as wood veneers, cement or patterned curtain fabrics emerge and disappear. Elements of a seemingly slick and futuristic architecture are counterbalanced by brushstrokes applied in thick and sometimes rapidly executed impasto.
The German title, FALLEN (Falling), alludes to ’loosing the ground beneath your feet’, a sensation of borderlessness. But it also implies a reality-check, a tough landing, a confrontation with limitation; and Geißler intends to invoke both aspects in her paintings. Ironically, the title also stands for ’falling into a trap’, which is why Geißler’s paintings shift continuously from perception to deception and back.
Inspirations for her compositions often derive from photographic material of buildings and places. Geißler digitally recomposes them to produce collage-like sketches, themes also recurrent in many of her works on paper, most apparent in her series “Richtungsschichtung”. However, most of the works on paper are executed in delicate watercolours like the beautiful “Vorfall” (incident) series. The watercolours are much less agitated than the paintings in favour of more sensitivity and warmer tones.
Ina Geißler’s obliterating as well as permeable superimpositions irritate and expand visual customs. In
many ways Geißler is a painter in the classic sense, her paintings defy the flood of images coming from
film and net. At the same time she creates a spatial cosmos that connects her imagery to the structures of urban landscapes. Geißler’s art serves as a pictorial filter for the digital age and can be read
as a laconic yet paradoxical comment on our time.
Born in Hamburg, Ina Geißler studied painting at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. She has exhibited widely in Germany and won several prizes and scholarships such as the Villa Serpentara in Olevano, Italy. Geißler lives and works in Berlin, her work is part of several high profile private collections.