 Jägermeister, 2004 Pigment marker on paper on acrylic glass, 74 x 118 inches Cornelia Renz Goff + Rosenthal Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Cornelia Renz. Born in 1966 in Kaufbeuren, Germany Renz was trained in Leipzig at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts). She completed her studies there in 1998. She lives and works in Berlin. Renz's pubescent girls present a fantasy of female and adolescent sexuality that challenge historical and cultural norms. Defiant and seemingly in control of both themselves and each of the paintings in which they are the central character, Renz's figures are anything but a cultural stereotype of the little girl as the epitome of vulnerability, weakness and purity. They attack and control, they flaunt their (hitherto taboo) sexuality and bodies, they hunt as blood sport, and they kill others and themselves in cold blood. Renz's little girls are the spawn of an over-the-top feminism, one which re-imagines a nascent woman as its opposite - an amoral man. The baby-faced criminal, hunter, and loner-suicide are painted precisely and boldly as, unmistakably, girls - girls who cock their little feet demurely even as their eyes lock in a cold gaze while going about their nasty business. In creating this troop of sociopathic Lolitas, Renz inverts fundamental cultural opposites into a dark fantasy of power and gender. As if to suggest that these girls do live in their own inverted, complex and separate universe, Renz meticulously builds each work as a distinct art-object. She paints on two separate surfaces, a front one of transparent acrylic and a back one that is either white acrylic or white polyurethane foam. Her medium is a specially mixed concoction of pigments and acrylic binder which prevents fading, poured into empty magic marker (surely a favorite tool of her subjects) casings. She applies the paint with the markers, adjusting the felt tips to get different qualities of line. Renz makes each frame always in white polyethylene, containing the individual work as if it were a Pandora's Box. The final effect is both three-dimensional and distancing - the painting is never available to be touched and hardly even able to be categorized as a painting - part drawing, part painting, part sculptural box. This is Cornelia Renz's first solo exhibition in the United States. Exhibition: March 4 - April 22, 2005 Goff + Rosenthal Gallery 537B West 23rd Street USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 675 0461 Fax +1 212 675 0534 www.goffandrosenthal.com |
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