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SINTA WERNER

In most of my architectonic installations there is one particular viewing point from which the space appears flat and pictorial. If one leaves this viewing point, the illusion of flatness is exposed. The interplay of exhibition space and additional architectural components now appears unstable, cubist and fragmented. In the centre of my artistic practice is the interest in the perception of space and its impact on a feeling of irritation, desorientation and vertigo. Mostly I react on the specific exhibition space by mirroring, doubling or adding architectural elements. Therefore I use methods derived from one-point perspectival construction as well as anamorphosis and camouflage.

The architectonic installations developed from painting and approaches in which I wanted to extend the notion of painting. In that context I am engaged with the tradition of illusionistic painting, with one-point perspective and Alberti's model of the visual pyramid. I am interested in the in-between-state between picture and space and therefore in principles known from stage design. I use scenographic mechanisms, for example the foreshortening of space, which is similar to a stage ('Dissolve', installation 2008) or painted objects that are put up like sceneries ('Panorama', painting 2005). Another topic is the mirroring of rooms, for example in the work 'Disjunction'(2007). The entrance area of the exhibition space and the change rooms of the former Victorian swimmimg pool behind the entrance area appear like the mirrored reflection in a sqare plane of an unreal mirror. From different angles it becomes clear that only the illusion of a flat mirror is conveyed and that in reality the installation spreads into the space behind the mirror. In other works, for example in 'Changing Cubicle' (painting installation, 2007) spatiality is dissolved. I painted the changing cubicle in brighter and darker grey tones in order to equalize the luminosity and thereby eliminate the form of the room.

Disjunction

The installation represents a mirroring, in which parts of the movable walls and the changing rooms behind the walls are reflected and reconstructed. By reproducing the Victorian architecture and the movable walls (that provide a pure exhibition background similar to a White Cube), the particular entanglement and mutual framing of these architectural styles is staged. From the viewpoint at the entrance, one sees the architectural object cut out into a square shape, which refers to the Albertian window – a frame through which a perspectival painting was traditionally constructed. The pyramidal shape evokes the idea of a three-dimensional draft of Renaissance perspective.

Dissolve

Sinta Werner is interested in projections at the interface between photography, sculpture and architecture. In the piece ‘Dissolve’ she responds to Stedefreund’s trapezoidal exhibition space with precisely formed, built-in elements, making the room’s perspectivally skewed configuration the subject of her artistic investigation. Using methods derived from one-point perspective construction, she creates duplications, overlaps and disruptions, both structurally and optically. Alberti’s model of the visual pyramid, the basis for every examination of art up to the present day, is simulated in three-dimensional space, shifting the observer’s perception and the exhibition space itself to the foreground of the analysis. (Carla Orthen)

Load Selection

In this collaborative work, Markus Wüste and Sinta Werner let a projection of an everyday-situation appear threedimensional: A distant place appears to have been teleported into the exhibition space, as in science fiction. (Carla Orthen)

Space Collages

’Space Collages’ depict an impossible, illogical place - one that allows for a collapse of order. My aim is to re-examine the validity of one-point perspective and its claim of verisimilitude. As a result of this proposal of multiple viewing points, the imaginary position of the viewer is de-centered. In ’Space Collages’ the collapse of perspectival order is confronted with the collapse of modernist utopias represented in the dismembered interior of a council house.

Cleaning Closet

I painted the walls of a cleaning closet in such a way that the cleaning utensils and appliances fused with their background. A mixture of camouflage and negative shadowing evokes this loss of space. The vacuum cleaner appears like a frog in mimetic disguise.

Changing Cubicle

For Changing Cubicle I used a wooden changing room in a former Victorian indoor pool as support for painting.
The work represents a reversed illusionism — it is not the creation of illusionistic depth that is intended, but rather the dissolution of space. I painted the cubicle in grey tones in order to equalize the luminosity and thereby eliminate the form of the room. This works only during nighttime when the space is illuminated by artificial light and spatial depth is flattened.

Somewhere or Other

The picture-objects ’Somewhere or Other’ are composed of large-format slides of architectural sights taken from different angles. The slides are arranged like miniature folding-screens, so that one can see different variations of superimposition while surrounding the work.

The configuration of the slides creates a fracturing and dematerialization of the original image, disorienting the viewer. This fragmented assembly is much like a reconstruction based on dreams or memories of the past, evoking a vague sense of places and feelings of childhood.

Perspicere

Perspicere (to look through) is comprised of a pinhole camera with five holes and photographs on each wall of the pentagon shaped box. The photographs have been taken with that camera and are presented in the camera body. I took the photographs at a junction at Kensington Gardens in London, a Victorian park with strictly arranged alleys. Through each hole, the image of the alley was projected onto the two opposite sides, so that altogether five exposures came into being.

With Perspicere I make reference to Jonathan Crary’s engagement with the history of photography’s origin, described in his book ’Techniques of the Observer’. Crary questions the general supposition that photography evolved directly from the camera obscura. For more than two centuries, the camera obscura symbolized a model for epistemology. It stood for a spectator who could understand and redefine the world from a separated point of view - the vantage point inside the camera obscura. The camera obscura became a symbol of how one could draw truthful conclusions about the exterior world by mere observation. Crary believes it was not the camera obscura, but other optical devices that would rather create optical illusions, that were relevant to the invention of photography.

With Perspicere I confuse perspectival representation through multiplication, the arrangement of images in space and double exposures. With this work I want to draw attention to the still-dominant acceptance of Renaissance perspective. Photography is still considered to be a representation of verisimilitude.

Furthermore I am interested in the relationship between spectator and image. Since Alberti, the perspectival image has been understood as a window that separates the spectator from the world. I want to point to this exclusion of the spectator by reversing the original relationship between world and spectator. This time it is not the spectator, but the object that is self-contained and gives the viewer insight through the five vantage points.

Rampenlicht

Strips of mirror are arranged in such a way that they mirror the light of neon tubes directly towards a particular point in the room. Standing here, the spectator will find himself in the limelight (=Rampenlicht).

Airfield

The starting point of this installation was a photographs of an airport runway. The intention was to question the borders of painting as well as the convention that a picture is presented in a rectangular format and placed in a vertical plane. With Airfield I wanted to deconstruct these pictorial components. I maintained the rectangular format of the image, but tipped it over, so that it came to lie on a diagonal plane. My aim was to illustrate the process of a picture coming into being, as if the plane of the runway is stuck in the middle of the process of becoming a picture. It is in an in-between state, not yet situated on the vertical wall. Compared to a scenery set, the pictorial space is pervious. One can step into the picture. By entering the room, you inevitably find yourself behind the scenery.

The inspiration for this work came from experiencing the moment of take-off in a plane, when the ground seems to angle away.

Framework

Framework is at the same time picture frame, representation of one point perspective and construction in space. The content is empty or that is to say the content is the framework plot. The work consists of the frame and is simultaneously an indication to the meaning of the frame in art history.

Greenberg's postulation of modernist art was to concentrate on the most important characteristics of the specific medium. For painting this meant that it should be occupied with its inherent features like flatness and the rectangular shape of the canvas. The painting of Frank Stella exemplifies this pure concept of painting that does not refer to anything outside painting but is only self-reflexive. Donald Judd transferred the already object-like painting into space in order to avoid more consequently any form of referentiality and illusionism.

Framework is meant as a reference to this tradition of self-referentiality in art and reflects in a self-critical way its own self-reflexivity.

Panorama

Since 2003, I have been engaged with making painted objects that refer to stage design. Using the language of painting these objects question the borders and characteristics of the medium. Though, the main topic of these works is the illusion of space represented in a plane and the opposite - the illusion of flatness in space. Stage scenery interests me because of its abstract qualities. It represents a state between drawing and actual constructed space which is capable of existing as a compressed space.
In the work Panorama I want to engage the original characteristic of illusionistic painting where representational situations are to be pressed into a two-dimensional scheme by inverting the pictorial situation. On the wooden support, horizontal stripes are painted in intense red and violet colours that are parallel to the edges. Horizontal beige stripes, in a second layer, seem to be straight if seen from a specific distance, although they are curved. The vibrant colours appear to come forward to an illusionistic plane in front of the physical surface. I will show a curved plane that will eliminate the real space and create a new space which exists in between two- and three-dimensions.

Colour and its impact in space plays a significant role in my working practice. The rather obvious intention of evoking an optical illusion is disturbed by the quality of colour to create space.

Beach Box

The work »beach box« engages the themes one point perspective and scenery in order to think about painting. The central-perspective is confronted with a mathematical space which is defined by coordinates arranged in rectangular angles.

The motive beach I have chosen because it seemed to be suitable for the illustration of central-perspective. The composition is based on the horizon and the alignment between the beach and the sea. Both lines cross at the vanishing point.

If the central perspective and the coordinate system are reduced to a scheme, both schemes consist of lines that meet at one point. In the work beach box I tried to evoke an irritation by making one scheme overlap the other. The picture of a beach has been exposed onto the construction of MDF, after being covered with foto-emulsion. The vanishing point is situated at the edge of the construction. The viewer perceives the image initially as a plane and then as an illusionistic space.

Kulissen (scenery wings)

The work Kulissen makes reference to the wings of a stage scenery. The horizontal lines which become more tight together to one sight, as in a perspective space, appear to be parallel from a particular standing point.

The illusionistic image is always the representation of a threedimensional starting point in a twodimensional plane. In the tradition of abstract painting such as Colorfield Painting or Geometric Abstraction, it became essential to emphasize the flatness of painting. In painting, the illusion of space was to be banished.

I am using a repertoire of forms which reminds of these fields of art. But it is my interest to pick out as a central theme topics just as central perspective and illusion of space. As well as creating an optical illussion, I wish to question: How does our perception function? What does this work mean in the context of art? What does it say about painting?

»Kulissen« has been exhibited in two different arrangements. I am interested in the interchangeable possibilities of this kind of work. If the canvases are standing on the floor, they loose their attributes as a painting and become indeed scenery wings.

In the work “Kulissen, where canvas sceneries are arranged in the room, the foreshortened lines on the canvases appear, depending on the viewer’s stand point, to be parallel.

EDUCATION

MA Fine Arts, Goldsmiths College, London, 2007


SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2008 iiiGrey Areas, NETTIE HORN, London, September
iiiiiiiiiiiiThe Third Floor at COMA (Center for Opinions in Music and Art), Berlin
iiiiiiiiiiiiSichtbarkeiten / Projektgalerie Hofmann von Sell, Berlin
iiiiiiiiiiiiWide Angels / Stedefreund, Berlin

2007 iiiFalse Giants, Stedefreund, Berlin, October
iiiiiiiiiiiiGoldsmiths MFA Show / Goldsmiths College, London
iiiiiiiiiiiiCeleste Art Prize / Truman Brewery, London

2006 iiEastwood / Moschee, Karl-Marx-Str. 58, Berlin?iiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiGrand Narratives / Galerie Bergstübl-Projekte ?iiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiKreisis / Galerieeigeneswohnzimmer

2005iii Buntes / Galerie Weißer Elefant
iiiiiiiiiiiiSeesaw / Berliner Kunstprojekt
iiiiiiiiiiiiElectric Ladyland / Umformwerk, Berlin
iiiiiiiiiiiiKlasse Kürschner / Foyer at UdK, Berlin

2004iii Meisterschülerausstellung / Foyer at UdK, Berlin

2003 iiiSideshow / »imug:«, Galerie sphn?iiiiiiiiiAbsolventenausstellung / Foyer at UdK, Berlin?iiiiiiiiiNeue Bilder III / Galerie für aktuelle Malerei

2002iii Keine Schleimfische / x-Garten

2001 iiiTurn`Turn / Galerie im Waschhaus, Potsdam

Grants

2008 iiiGoldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT

2008iii studio grant, Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, Berlin

2006iii Postgraduate Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the academic year 2006/2007 in Great Britain

2003 iiiFulbright travel grant

2003iii NICA-Stipendium of the Universität der Künste, Berlin