Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Jacek Malinowski
collaboration on the part of Zachęta: Julia Leopold

The Installation for the Interior by Anemona Crisan is the second work to be unveiled in the unusual space that is the niche located in the basement of the Zachęta Gallery. This time the artist has annexed more space than was initially available. It could not have been otherwise: this act of annexation is an oft-repeated aspect of many of the artist’s projects. Crisan loves space. She likes to enter it to examine its main parameters and dimensions in order to cleverly escape architecture's strict limitations. This is done in two directions: on the inside and to the outside.

The first of these directions refers to structures which can be called organic and are associated with the interior of the body: the construction of cells or the inner structure of muscle fibres. From the repertoire of bodily imagery, the artist dissects the elements that intrigue her most and that help her to achieve her goal. This is the goal of linearity, giving things direction, the designation of turning points and points of reference within a space, directing the eyes and movements of the viewer.

The achieving of linearity also helps the artist reach in the opposite direction: towards geometry and architecture, and thus beyond the personal or private domain. The new axes identified by Crisan overcome existing spatial divisions and dominants. Spontaneously plotted coloured lines of varying thickness and direction break the architecture, forcing a change in its most distinctive features and ideological agenda. The result is a new, heterogeneous quality – something like a spider’s web – sliding over all available surfaces.

On the basis of the artist’s completed projects, one can see what she has already achieved. Her personal discovery is a linearity of interiors that has nothing to do with a repetition of the original architectural design. The new quality she creates is rather a manifestation of freedom through the re-valorization and reinterpretation of spatial and aesthetic relations.

The linearity of the interior, as a constitutive principle, inspires the building of complex and intertwining references and dependencies, as well as the introduction of new components. In this way Anemona Crisan is able to appropriate any existing space, deny it or appoint it with distinction.

Anemona Crisan, born 1980 in Bucharest, lives in Vienna, She studied at the University in Innsbruck and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.