Curated by_Jan Verwoert: next to perplexed you
Magni Borgehed, Sarah Forrest, Virginia Hutchison, Malin Gabriella Nordin, Lucy Stein

Opening: Thursday, October 10, 2013, 6 pm
Exhibition: October 11 - November 14, 2013

Painting. Reading. Writing. Are among things to be done around the house. But you could also: Prepare food. Pick a fight with your sister. Check for ghosts. Make love. Phone the printer. Or the house of commons. Tease the cat. Play some music. Not that these activities couldn't also be pursued in and from other places. Yet, in the house they may all happen, under one roof. So much can come to pass here on a single day that things feel like they happen not after, but next to one another, in parallel, at once.

Next to: Adjacency. Not history. Though it may be written in the process — of talking over breakfast, lunch, dinner. Peacefully perhaps. But not necessarily so. For politics sit across the table from you while art, literature and other troubles occupy the chairs next to yours. Members of the extended family. No enemies as such. But that won't already make them friends. Devils at your table. Lovers on the porch. Kobolds in the garden. Siblings all around.

Life at the Bell's? Virginia moody and Vanessa painting or getting some etchings done: for the dust jackets of Virginia's books, published, next to Freud's, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house the Woolfs ran from home. Jackets are wrappers: they wrap pictures around poetry, painting around prose; they wrap up abstraction and narration into a thing (book) to be put into circulation, for shaping the modern condition, maybe.

Taking its cue from the zany congenial wit of Vanessa Bell's jacket designs for Woolf's books, the exhibitionnext to perplexed you shows the work of artists practicing adjacency: painting is in the house with patterning and object-making for Magni Borgehed, it is wrapped up in an imbroglio of color alchemy by Lucy Stein, it lives among ghosts amidst rocks with Malin Gabriella Nordin, and is but a philosopher's stone’s throw away from the concrete poetry and prose by Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, set in letters cast from lead objects they made and then melted down. The medium? A means for making adjacent worlds brush up against each other in a house where ink is sister to paint.

Jan Verwoert

  Magni Borgehed, Sarah Forrest, Virginia Hutchison, Malin Gabriella Nordin, Lucy Stein, Jan Verwoert, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
  http://www.martinjanda.at/en/exhibitions/2013/10/155/curated-by-jan-verwoert/