House Hold Fold - Installation shot 03
House Hold Fold - Installation shot 12
Diana Sirianni - Untitled - slider

Diana’s daring installations were recommended by gallery artist Pius Fox, my following Berlin studio visit was a sheer delight. Diana’s mix of animated passion with a much more cerebral approach is unusual, as if Southern Italian Baroque meets Prussian intellect. The collaborative exhibition HouseHoldFold (one of our best exhibition titles!) was a highlight in how two artists successfully investigate the boundaries of architecture and space in very different ways. Diana’s imagery is often worked on digitally, an aspect little featured in the program mostly due to my lack of technical curiosity. What Diana virtually creates to then bring back into the physical space is subtle and beautiful, carefully considered and on larger scale even sublime and spectacular.

Diana Sirianni’s spatial collages are composed of numerous smaller and larger image fragments, which are mounted on walls like parts of a jigsaw puzzle or hanging from invisible nylon threads. The artist takes pictures of buildings and spaces that she then deconstructs and newly configures through digital manipulation by adding or rearranging parts on the computer. Sirianni then transfers the full composition back into the three-dimensional space. Being newly assembled, the delicately balanced and suspended shapes add up to fragile references of fractured architectures or spaces her works had previously been shown in.

Sirianni is interested in representation, imitation, appropriation and multiplication, topics that triggered her exploration of the historical period of Baroque, where exaggerated motion and simple, capturing details produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur. However, it is not the artistic style’s overload and attention to detail she relates to but the excessive layering and adoption of different influences, which are freely combined and thus become something new. Her moving sculptures include materials such as acrylic paint, cardboard, foil, Plexiglas, paper, cellophane and enamel. The Berlin artist also experiments with two dimensional photo collages, where she combines photographs, coloured paper, tape, paint and silicon, blurring the line between photography, sculptural relief and painting.

What is remarkable in Sirianni’s oeuvre is that she includes a moment of time, movement and progression. At first glance her works act like film stills: a snapshot event, an explosion; a frozen stream of data. But then they develop: single parts connect, depart and leave us with experiencing long gone reminders of former presentations. In addition, Sirianni refines the work as the exhibition progresses, adding more pieces and extending the framing. The work functions like a progressing drawing in space where the sculptural mobiles spill onto the floor, scale walls, manifest on the windows and ceiling. No beginning, no centre, no end. The works expand into space and beyond into our imagination of possible architectures and spaces.

Diana Sirianni received a scholarship from Braunschweig PROJECTS, HfBK Braunschweig and the art award of the Leinemann-foundation for education and art in cooperation with the Friends of the UdK Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, Berlin. In 2016 she held a solo show at Kunstverein Göttingen with the title Gewagte Entgrenzungen.

 

 

Exhibitions at the gallery:

House Hold Fold, 2015 (two-person show with Pius Fox)

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