Photo: Iris Kren
16 January – 20 February 2024
P74 Gallery
______
The core of Iris Kren’s artistic practice revolves around the concept of overexposure, which she deals with through the social prism and the visual medium. The photographic overexposure technique is the base on which the artist builds with the painting medium. The desire to erase should be read as a reflection of the contemporary information overload, in which the need to retreat into complete solitude is very much present. This exhibition presents the artist’s phonograms and paintings.
The phonogram series explicitly reveals an overexposure photographic technique. These pieces were not created using a camera. Instead, objects were placed directly on a light-sensitive material (e.g., photographic paper) and exposed to light. We can thus observe the tonal dynamics that the artist achieves through the material’s transparency and playing with light. The grey-scale fading out creates a sequence of gradual sifting and information reduction. While the motives are at first emphasised by the excessive illumination, this overexposure gradually erases the object’s outline. The information is given and then taken away.
Kren transfers the overexposure photographic technique, as a tool for the reduction and erasure of information, into her painting practice so that, in her own words, she can experience the canvas as a sieve of information. The images, these memories or shadows of memories enclosed within the boundaries of this information sieve, are in a perpetual state of absolute uncertainty in which each brushstroke blurs the line between the real and the imaginary. These art pieces explore the relationship between what is present and what is not and point to a thoughtful consideration taking place on a purified surface. The latter, while indeed pure or empty, hints at the problems of overcrowdedness typical of the contemporary world – Kren aims to relieve the painting sphere of all unnecessary information and replace them with gentle bluish pigments that, in contrasting transitions, create a sense of transience and uncertainty.
The colour palette in these pieces is rather limited, even restrained – the bright patches of »emptiness« mix with darker silhouettes, yet these do not limit the feeling of transparency and airiness. The monumental character of her larger paintings directly provokes a physical sense and experience of almost meditative emptiness. The motifs inhabiting the paintings are reduced to whiteness, while in phonograms, they tend toward black; in both cases, the motive disappears, and the final result is the erasure of information. This emptiness that dominates the painting field invites the spectator to engage in an introspective game and become an active co-creator of the piece that will reach its final point precisely with a contemplation on the relationship between the void and its observer.
Maja Albreht, Urška Štefanič
______
Iris Kren (2001) is currently completing her undergraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Her work explores the concept of overexposure from both an artistic and a social perspective. Kren applies the overexposure photographic technique to her painting practice as a tool for erasing/reducing information and sees the desire for erasure as a response to the overwhelming overexposure to information in contemporary society.
______
Interview with Iris Kren (pdf)
The interview was conducted by Hana Kreševič.
