IDEA13

First solo exhibition at a UK public gallery for the German artist Kitty Kraus opens this Saturday.

The exhibition will present four elements of Kraus’ current work: ‘an antennae piece, a found window ‘shutter’ cut to shape, gap reflecting lamps, and a series of drawings that present the fictional and often incorrect trajectories of light escaping from the inwardly reflective interiors of the artist’s mirror-lamps.’

For this exhibition, the artist has produced a single-level reflecting lamp for Southend-on-Sea. Previously, the artist has used six inwardly facing mirror panes to encase a light that outwardly refracts light in a kaleidoscopic manner, however the new work enforces a more solitary, horizontal and contemplative effect. Paradoxically, her formal, even mathematical stringency for creating art connects with an effective means or recipe for each work’s own destruction or dissolution. If this occurs in various ways – in the gradual melting of her ice-blocks, for example, which leave traces of ink on the floor once the object has gone – then in her mirror-lamps, it takes place in the refraction and explosion of light that breaks out to project geometric patterns onto the surrounding walls.

This exhibition will be shown at the same time as the London 2012 Olympic Games in nearby Stratford, and from an architectural point of view, one might read the aesthetic of Kraus’ work as a comment on the Olympic project’s audacity in relation to the closure and enforced decay of classic regional buildings that function as key community centres.

Read more on Focal Point gallery website.