crossover
Elmira Iravanizad / Krasimira Stikar
In co-operation with kunstraumarcade Mödling
Originally used to describe a mix of different (music) styles, the term crossover has come to denote something that connects elements without denying the differences between them. At the first meeting of the two artists invited to present their work at this exhibition, Elmira Iravanizad (Germany/Iran) and Krasimira Stikar (Bulgaria, Austria) decided to make it the title of their show.
Every year we, the team of AIR and of kunstraumarcade, think carefully about which of the scholarship holders we could invite to present an exhibition. For the year 2019, we chose Elmira Iravanizad. We appreciate her consistent minimalism, and by the beginning of the exhibition she will already have spent two months as an artist-in-residence in Krems (December 2018, January 2019). This is not an insignificant argument, since the artist can use her residency to prepare for the exhibition, but will also have enough time to engage in general reflections on her work untrammeled by daily concerns – which is an important aspect of a residency. Given that AIR seeks to encourage networking between resident and local artists, we were very much in favor of the request of kunstraumarcade to include an artistic stance from Austria. The joint project enables the artists to explore approaches and concepts different from their own. The choice fell on Krasimira Stikar, whose minimalist use of artistic means, particularly for her drawings, will invite exciting comparisons with the objects and paintings by Elmira Iravanizad.
Elmira Iravanizad, born in Iran and based in Berlin, produces subtle work at the interface between image and object. On almost completely monochrome canvases she places organoid shapes that give structure and accentuate the image. The artist uses color sparingly, and her style of painting is anything but ephemeral or gestural - everything evolves from her thorough exploration of painting and painting techniques. She also creates objects whose shapes might have been extracted directly from the paintings. They seem to grow out of the wall or are placed on the floor, divorced from content and context. Most of the objects consist of metal and ceramics, a marriage of two very divergent materials. The artist accentuates this contrast by giving ceramics an almost fluid character - the monochrome coloring binds the two elements into one object. Since her move to Berlin, Iravanizad has started to work increasingly with yellow, considering this color to symbolize the cultural differences between Iran and Germany. Iravanizad created all of the artwork for the exhibition during her residency in Krems.
The minimalist drawings of the Bulgarian artist Krasimira Stikar, who lives in Vienna, are presented in a dialogue with Iravanizad’s work. Lines are at the basis of Stikar’s artwork, which seems very spontaneous but evolves from a careful exploration of lines, the spaces between them and movement. As Stikar initially worked in animation, her drawings are derived from movement, the flow of time, where the line always has a task to fulfil in the sequence of images that make up a whole. Over the years, Stikar has moved from digital animation film to analogue images. She is still interested in the moving image. While she now focuses more on autonomous drawings, animation continues to be a wellspring for her creative output. As a result, movement in connection with immobility, fleeting lines and conscious placement on the canvas have become important themes for her. ‘Point and line to plane,’ to quote Kandinsky, characterizes the calm, minimalist drawings by Krasimira Stikar.
Andreas Hoffer
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