Past

Ester Fleckner: A closet does not connect under the bed

22 Jan – 12 Mar 2016

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the famous American writer Gertrude Stein’s playful poem A Substance in a Cushion in which she almost manically reels off and dissects sensory impressions, conveying them in an impressionistic and sensuous language. “A closet does not connect under the bed” is not at first glance a sentence that makes sense.

Ester Fleckner’s interest in the relationship between language and physical objects started during her studies at the art academy. Working with the traditional artistic craft of woodcuts, her works include the series Clit-dick Register(2013), establishing a sign language for sexual characteristics that mutate, blur and transform, and Wooden Scripts (How I love your obscure)(2015) in which a small star-shaped symbol multiplies to generate a hermetic yet clearly chronologically developed vocabulary. A central element in Fleckner’s work is that the crafting process and the errors and traces that emerge during it are neither erased nor corrected, but are instead used as a starting point for new approaches, paths and possibilities. Her woodcuts almost always have added fragments of pencil-written sentences and drawings as extensions of or interventions in the motif. Meanings and contexts are suggested and negotiated, but continue to evade definition.