Exhibition date: 21 May - 1 June 2004
Gallery Hours: 10.30-18.30
Contact: Nima Zohari
Mob: Archived project, no more contact about this.
Karine Pradier’s solo show ‘Twin Daughter’ at Case-1 represents a unique opportunity to view her recent works as a whole, in a setting which emphasizes the consistency of her vision, and which in addition charges it with an unsettling ‘presence’.
In the current climate, technical drawing ability is rarely associated with a deep understanding of mood and content. Here Pradier uses her rare skill in this regard to transcend questions of media. Having experimented in the past with print and installation, she returns here to work that by its nature connects her ever more intimately with the model and the viewer. As such, ‘Twin Daughter’ marks a critical juncture in the development of the artist and a refocusing towards new goals.
“A picture becomes itself in the moment of being seen” admits Siri Hustvelt’s hero, William Wechsler, an imaginary artist. In his pictures the same woman grows and shrinks and at each extreme defies recognition. The same could be said of Karine Pradier’s drawings, all of which use the same model, her daughter.
Though portraits usually exist independently from their viewers, Pradier’s girl(s) are read differently by the female, the male, the child, the mother’s... The fact that the subject is a child makes the triangular relationship artist/model/viewer even more problematic in today’s social context. Far from avoiding the polemic, the artist stretches the issue as far as mimicking pixels on the model’s face in some of the drawings as one might see in tabloids. Pradier confronts the viewer with his own phobia and censorship. The representation alternates between submission and aggression, tenderness and brutality though it always caries the strength and honesty of the tie that links the artist with her model. In addition to drawing, Pradier is showing a series of sculptures. Clothed hollow forms echo a ghostly presence – and absence – of childlike figures: perhaps a reminder of an old trick, a cushion under the bedclothes to fool us into believing.
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