How we met the artist:
'Ina was one of the few artists that I had already shown in my flat and in a Berlin project before I opened the gallery. The contact came through an architect working with her husband that was fascinated with Pessina’s ‘Totem’. Ina was back then experimenting with photomontage fragmenting architecture. A subject that also defines her paintings, whose structural depth and the careful construction make them exceptional. I always liked the surfaces, Ina uses egg tempera to result in a warmer, more muted colour scheme. Recently Ina has realized several impressive public projects and a series of text based cutouts inspired by her lasting interest in language, that was already visible in the titles of her paintings - a medium she had mastered yet I hope she will return to.' - Patrick Heide
About:
Ina Geissler’s paintings and drawings are colourful, abstract compositions of layered forms, ruptured surfaces and complex spatial structures. Some of the earlier works refer to actual architectural spaces – adumbrating the surface of a skyscraper or a multi-storey car park, a stairway, fragments of a window or railing – some of them remain almost fully abstract and split into interlocked shapes playing with multiple layers and interlaced patterns. The grid structure and superimposed spheres are recurring motives in her large-format paintings in egg tempera on canvas as well as her watercolours on paper, albeit these series leave more space for a more painterly, colour sensitive and less architectural approach to the subject matter.
Fragmentation predominate her paintings and drawings, and in a way also her most recent cut and folded laser print works. In these, Geissler keeps her interest in spatial depth, but translates it from the two-dimensional medium into more sculptural paper-based works where she combines text and space. The text or sentences become legible as the letters fold out of the surface into various directions to leave a negative of the text as well as a folded out positive in a relief-like surface. Cut from white or double-sided coloured papers, depending on the perspective and differing light effects, the text becomes readable or illegible, suspended in space the messages can be decoded from both sides. Sentences like ‘Make fore and background merge’ or ‘Build bridges…’ leave the viewer with a message to evaluate and think about when looking at these complex works on paper, whose actual structures and compositions also formally resonate the sentence they display. The messages can be a literal or ephemeral instruction like in concrete poetry, or a kind truism like in Jenny Holzer’s sculptures. The image becomes thus the paradigm for its own appeal.
The change between the inner and the outer world remain predominant in Geissler’s artistic work. Oscillating between illusion and reality her paintings are kaleidoscopic images of our ever-changing virtual world.
Ina Geissler has exhibited widely in Germany, the UK and USA and won several prizes and scholarships such as the prolific Villa Serpentara in Olevano, Italy. She has realized a number of public projects amongst others the permanent installation Unterton for the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (together with Fabian Lippert).
Exhibitions at the gallery:
Still’s Life, 2010 (solo show)
Fallen/Trapped, 2008 (solo show)