Losing The Image

10 Sep-19 Oct 2024

PV 10 Sep 2024, 6.30-8.30pm

Overview

Taking its title from Phyllida Barlow's words, Albricht’s second solo exhibition at JGM Gallery encourages its audience to consider paintings as spatial environments, which both evade definition and illicit novel interpretations on each viewing. In Barlow’s case, the phrase, 'losing the image', refers to the particular way in which the viewer experiences a three-dimensional object as they move around it. For Albricht this also opens up an enquiry into what an image means and what is its relationship to the world. This enquiry, as well as the paintings in the exhibition, is informed by her interest in Eastern Orthodox icon paintings, alongside her recent residency in rural Norfolk and the way it reaffirmed Albricht’s relationship to nature. Losing The Image traces her shifts in pictorial thinking, the image being progressively questioned and rephrased.

For Albricht, as a painter, absolute distinctions surrounding object and image become blurred. The surfaces of her works often accumulate thick layers of paint of varying tonalities. Others emerge through subtle glazes. Regardless of how the mark is made, the paintings seem to exist not only pictorially but also three-dimensionally. Interested in the body, its movement, and the space it occupies, Albricht transfers these relationships into a pictorial field. As such, the materiality of the surface becomes an experience - an event - both for the artist and viewer, which recalls the idiosyncrasies of the hand that made it.

In many of the smaller works from this exhibition, compositional elements extend beyond the confines of the surface and its border. These protrusions further challenge the definition of ‘the painted image’, instead recalling practices reminiscent of sculpture or collage. Offering varying perspectives from which they can be viewed and functioning simultaneously as both object and painting, Albricht’s works present us with a multiplicity of readings. The ambiguity of the surface challenges the urge of mimetic imperative: Albricht deconstructs form into shifting fields of colour, light and space, which meet with an angled precision and introduce a certain geometry. Yet, rather than possessing the geometrical severity of minimalism, the rhythmic nature of the marks, the fluidity of the paint and organic extensions of the picture plane, diffuse any sense of graphic regularity.

Central to the attraction of Albricht's work, in the words of Jennifer Guerrini-Maraldi (JGM Gallery's Director), is "... an aesthetic and stylistic originality that distinguishes Karolina as an artist of great courage and daring."

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