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until 10.11. | #2155ARTatBerlin | Aurel Scheibler presents from 29th September 2018 the Solo Exhibition a m o r e with works by the artist Vivian Greven.
For Vivian Greven, the story of Armor and Psyche is the starting point of her new works. It is the ancient representation of a unity destroyed by Psyche’s desire to recognize the true form of her lover: her mind demands to see the nature of Cupid, for what we see is easier to comprehend. Knowledge and visualization are central themes in the art of Vivian Greven. As an artist of a generation that grew up with the Internet, she transfers the mechanisms of media image production to the construction of her sculptures. The digital distribution of idealized images is now permeating all areas of life. Characteristic is their smooth surface, which usually only presents itself and under which nothing is present. Impeccability and smoothness are attributes that promise success, and the pursuit of it explains the ubiquitous urge for self-optimization and the excess of design. Vivian Greven paints such surfaces.
Vivian Greven, Unda, 2018,
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 cm
Finely crafted incarnation meets monochrome colors, volume on a disembodied surface. The hybrid is symptomatic of our era. And equally significant for them is a flood of media images in which a focused look removes fragments of images from a context and demands meaning. Vivian Greven isolates such elements from her pictures and gives them independence. A tear turns into a hole, a hole becomes a comma and the gap becomes a meaning carrier. Her focus is also on Psyche’s hands, albeit without showing the butterfly, whose wings pick up psyche, and which, without its wings, becomes a soulless body. The gap in the picture symbolizes the barely tangible and difficult to understand. By exploring the limits of natural and artificial, animated and inanimate, Vivian Greven simultaneously becomes an image of a postmodern subject-perception in the digital age. Art no longer mimics life but life artificiality. The smooth surface is a facade and the substantial human behind it barely noticeable. Amor only visited Psyche under cover of darkness to hide his divine form from her. The human flaw in Psyche was her unbridled desire to recognize the true form of her lover. With the light of an oil lamp she wanted to see his face, but a drop of hot oil hurt him, and disappointed in her breach of trust, Amor turned away from her, leaving Psyche in despair and deep sorrow. Injuries show up in wounds.
The painted surface of Vivian Greven is immaculate only at first glance. It shows fine scars and cracks and in a relief even knife-like cuts. Looking at a surface always raises the question of what lies beneath it. Exactly this question Vivian Greven addresses.
Vivian Greven, born in 1985 in Bonn, lives and works in Düsseldorf. She studied English and painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There she was a master student of Prof. Siegfried Anzinger. In 2016 she received the Strabag Artaward. In August 2018, the Providence College Galleries Scholarship in Rhode Island, USA, participated in the group exhibition Classic Beauty: 21st Century Artists on Ancient Form (until November 17, 2018). Her works are part of the exhibition Ekstase im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (from September 29, 2018 to February 24, 2019).
Vernissage: Friday, 28th September 2018, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 29th September – Saturday, 10th November 2018
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Image caption: Vivian Greven, Unda, 2018, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 cm
Exhibition Vivian Greven – Aurel Scheibler | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
