Prequel Bay
Ribordy Contemporary Gallery
January 19 - March 11, 2017
Opening: Thursday Jan 19, 2017, 6-9pm
Ribordy Contemporary
Boulevard d’Yvoy 7b
CH - 1205 Geneva
http://www.ribordycontemporary.com/
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RUN, RUN, RUN,
National center for contemporary art - Villa Arson, Nice, France
Exhibition: October 2 to December 30, 2016
Opening: Saturday October 1, 2016 from 6 pm
Villa Arson
20 av. Stephen Liégeard
06105 Nice Cedex 2
https://www.villa-arson.org/
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Manifesta 11 - THE EUROPEAN BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Exhibition: 11.6.– 18.9.2016 ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
Date of performance:
Friday, September 2, 2016
Cabaret der Künstler – Zunfthaus Voltaire
Spiegelgasse 1
8001 Zürich.
http://m11.manifesta.org/en/art-artists/cabaret-der-kunstler-zunfthaus-voltaire
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IRON PALM
Exhibition: March 10 - April 9, 2016
Opening: March 10 2016, 6pm
Galerie Sator
8, passage des Gravilliers
(access 10, rue Chapon 75003 Paris)
+33 (0)1 42 78 04 84
www.galeriesator.com
Vincent Sator is pleased to introduce Iron Palm, the second solo exhibition by Kristina Irobalieva at Sator Gallery, from March 10th until April 9th, 2016.
As a classically trained painter, the Bulgarian artist Kristina Irobalieva began her career by working with large format paintings, in a postmodernist spirit, where one could see influences by Jörg Immendorf and Martin Kippenberger. Since 2009, she has been practicing sculpture and installations, while enrolling her painting practice in a wider context of the history of shapes and their interpretations. (…)
Kristina Irobalieva is interested in the narrative potential contained within the object. She analyses, dissects, and reinvents the possibilities by working with the materiality, the situation and the context of her work’s appearance.
“Deconstructing is to understand,” she says. She also chose the title of her exhibition “Iron Palm” relating to the Martial Arts conditioning technique which allows a practitioner to break a solid object with bare hands. Hence, she surrounds us here with fragments and ruins.
The curious texture of the group of paintings declining the same image, would drive the spectator to approach and look into their uneven surfaces. One will notice that the plant’s intermingling pattern vanishes into the thickness and brightness of the uneven, harsh surfaces. (...)
In counterpoint to this series of paintings, twisted concrete reinforcing bars made out of ceramic are exposed. Isolated from an entire construction, similar to the paintings, their deactivation induces an expectance, a kind of suspension of time. “Far from the antique pillar, a model for the romantics, contemporary ruin is the mirror of a present that, not without shivering, gazes at it’s proper deserted space, restoring the life of things” wrote Diane Scott. (...)
If the subject of ruin, of catastrophe, and decay are fashionable in contemporary art, Kristina Irobalieva doesn't let herself be fixated on romantic and melancholy allusions. It is mostly the state of ruin that interests her, this "life of things" that once rejected for their functional uses, deliver themselves in their materiality. It is the opacity of this materiality, it's power of embodiment, and its illusion that Irobalieva inquires the possibilities through a simulacrum approach. The objects she creates are the base for reflection on the object’s historical value, whether they be artistic or functional. They also project future inspirations, setting the scene for the next exhibition.
Marguerite Pilven, January 2016
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Born in 1982 in Sofia, Kristina Irobalieva is currently a residential artist at
Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the recipient of the Simon I. Patiño Foundation Grant. Graduate of the Head (University of Art and Design), Geneva and the Villa Arson National School of Fine Arts, Nice, she was a fellow of the Swiss Confederation for her research project at the Experimentation and research center for contemporary ceramics in Geneva. Since she regularly exhibits her work in Switzerland and abroad: Zurich, Basel, Paris, Nice, Sofia, Cologne, London…
Jungle Series 2015 - 2016 : mixed media on canvas, 40 x 40 cm
Fer à beton: faience, enamel 2016