Tatiana Blass @ Johannes Vogt Gallery

Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s first solo show with Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass. For her debut in New York, Blass will present a recent body of work centering around the scenario of the interview. The exhibition is composed of two iron sculptures, a suite of oil paintings, and a video work featuring theatrical performance.

As part of the artist’s practice, Blass composes figurative sculptures out of microcrystalline wax that become fluid over the duration of their exhibition. Antagonized by spotlights and heating elements, the sculptures slowly deform and are overtaken by entropy. In the recent works on display, Blass takes up the theme of the interview, composing paintings and sculptures in which subject, audience, and medium break down into one another. Approximating the process of the melting wax, these figures become trapped in between fixed states. As the figures soften and blur, they lose their definite forms, and the line between subjects becomes obscured.

In the paintings and sculptures, Blass engages the dialectics between the subject and the recording apparatus. Instruments of modern technology present anything but a clear medium: human figures and recording instruments appear sucked into one another, collapsing into single forms. In the series of paintings, figures are seen merging into their surroundings, out of which the ominous, near incomprehensible motif of the camera emerges.

This strain is amplified in the video Hard Water, where communication becomes subject to the whims of language, to linguistic play. Two actors engage in an absurd conversation of misunderstanding, during which they become progressively entangled in the numerous threads that bind their clothing to the surrounding walls of the stage. The physical stage records the labors and actions of the two women, visually representing the linguistic entanglement that only worsens as they fight to regain clarity.

Tatiana Blass was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1979. Her work spans sculpture, painting, video and installation. She has been featured in the 2010 Sao Paulo Bienal with a performance based piece called “Piano Surdo.” She was nominated for the famous PIPA Prize in both 2010 and 2011. She succeeded to win the prize in 2011 with her piece “Blinding Light – Seated” that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. This year Blass was given her first US solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Her works are part of collections such as CIFO, Miami and the museums of modern art in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. She is currently featured with a profile in the September issue of Modern Painters and was shortlisted as one of Art+Auction’s “50 most collectible artists under 50.”

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