NYAB Event - Clara Broermann “Der Tag davor”

Clara Broermann “Der Tag davor”

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

This event has ended.

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery presents the first U.S. solo show of works by Berlin-based painter Clara Broermann.

Recalibrating the title and temporal concerns of Edward Munch’s proto-Expressionist composition Der Tag danach (“The day after”) of 1886, Broermann’s exhibition Der Tag davor (“The day before”) annexes a set of stylistic tropes that contrast pointedly with her reference’s subjective immediacy and fatalistic encodings. While articulated in a geometric vocabulary that evokes Suprematist ideals of purified sensation and Constructivist rationalism, her work nonetheless thinks through these legacies in a manner untethered from narratives of spiritual and political yearning. Knowingly playing her cards on a table built on the wobbly legs of ready-made gestures, her practice attests to painting’s ability to reanimate artistic means from ‘the day before’ - no matter their earlier emotive or utopian intents - while foregoing both historical determinism and ahistorical rehabilitation.

A parallel concern with a comparatively abridged temporal scale emerges in the specificities of Broermann’s paintings themselves, where titles generate diaristic allusions and forms signal but never fully disclose the histories of their individual construction. Graphic strips and curves within her images are rendered by an accretion of oils applied painstakingly in combination with pencil, ink and acrylic putty and pigments. Intermittently, Broermann tempers her paintings’ structural precision with soft swaths of exposed canvas interlaid between variously stratified materials-the result of sanding, fraying, tearing, cutting and other destructive procedures cued by the particularities of earlier markings. Upsetting anticipated continuities between a surface’s thickness and its relative point of origin within the chronology of an image, complex formal relations result gradually from the artist’s superimposition of additive and subtractive methods. In each painting, contrastive aesthetic modes variously emphasize and dissolve distinctions between edge and picture plane, incident and intent, image and medium - at once engaging and eluding set relations to process and history.

Clara Broermann (born in Duisburg; lives and works in Berlin) graduated from Robert Lucander’s master class at Berlin’s Universität der Künste in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented by Schwarz Contemporary and Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung, Berlin. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at public and private venues including: Kunsthalle Athena (Athens); Madder 139 (London); HfBK (Hamburg); Autocenter, Freies Museum, Heit, Kunstwerke, and The Wand (Berlin).