Galerie Karsten Greve is delighted to show a solo exhibition featuring new work by Scottish artist Georgia Russell, who has been represented by the gallery since 2010. The show, which will be Georgia Russell's sixth solo exhibition with Galerie Karsten Greve, is a DC OPEN GALLERIES 2021 event. New works on canvas will be presented, created at her Méru studio between 2020 and 2021 during a worldwide state of crisis that was characterised by confinement and social distancing measures. By contrast, Georgia Russell has created her most recent works by breaking through matter. Her pieces epitomise the idea of the permeability of matter and breaking through the surface – ajouré – to bring this materiality to life by deliberately incorporating daylight and air into space.
A radical gesture on which Georgia Russell's oeuvre is based is dissection of her working material. She works with surgical precision using the clinician's dissecting knife for her own purposes, as an artist's pencil, to carefully fillet photos, music scores, prints, entire books, painted canvases, or, serving as her raw material for amazing art objects: "For me, cutting up is an artistic act of liberation. Like drawing, but instead of a pencil I use a scalpel," this is how, a few years ago, the artist characterised her method of working.
Her approach has become more complex; during the last few years, she is increasingly replacing the pencil with the brush. By painting, the artist has managed to liberate herself, so to speak, daring to leap into a sculptural sphere in which there is, apart from colour, more air and light than materiality. The idea behind these pieces is "to open up a flat surface to let the light in, to let the air through so that it's breathing like lungs ..."
The current exhibition at Karsten Greve's Cologne gallery space creates an unusual framework for a presentation tailored to the location showcasing monumental pictures in fascinating bright colours. Whereas in her early work, the artist used colour to create intricate formal structures, she now focuses on an intuitive interplay of colour and light. Inspired by meticulous observations of nature in her immediate surroundings, Georgia Russell processes notions of subtle movement and growth in her intensely coloured works created recently. For Georgia Russell, colour is "a living and moving material that has a life of its own, like water or wind." The use of colour decisively intensifies the effect of space and dynamism in Georgia Russell's paintings. As a result, the onlooker can discover an almost meditative work that is characterised by a deliberate rhythm, and creates a unique network in a tactile surface.
