24.05 – 12.07.2019
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, untitled, 2019, antique wooden windowframe and egg tempera, dimensions variable
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, o.T., 2015, egg tempera and canvas strips, 20 x 32 cm
Justina Becker, o.T., 2015, egg tempera on canvas, 20 x 32 cm
Justina Becker, o. T., 2015, egg tempera on canvas, 20 x 32 cm
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view (nighttime)
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view (nighttime)
Justina Becker, 2019, installation view (nighttime)
All things have a strangeness to them for those who care to look. Their foreignness has been long recognised, whether this takes the form of the thing-in-itself, never to be experienced or trauma, first defined as that which acts like a foreign body in the mind. We notice the strangeness of objects for instance, when blunt or broken they stop being useful and they turn away from us and each other. Justina Becker pays close attention to things in their strangeness. The objects she incorporates in her practice are always things that she finds close by, in her house or in the small town where she lives, and almost always, these things have been abandoned, damaged in some regard, without a use. The objects have a history to them – even the viewer not privileged enough to know more of their background, the wheres and hows they came about, can recognise the signs of their previous use. They retain a sense of having lived their own life, among other people and other objects.
Having studied painting to graduate with Klasse Hildebrand, Justina Becker approaches her objects with the eye of a painter. Her older work was concerned with the material qualities of painting. How the canvas goes around the stretcher would be important or the way that the canvas keys fit tightly into the corner of a frame. A shift in her practice occurred when she discovered the readymade and began to use things that previously belonged to someone else. Initially she would wrap these objects in various ways. Some would be covered in a layer of light, sheer fabric almost like a shroud, others would be tightly wound with brightly coloured woollen thread. This protective gesture had a double meaning. On the one hand, it would be a way of hiding the object, obscuring its material qualities and past histories. On the other hand, the object would never be completely covered and through the various gaps and imperfections, its material history would become even more apparent.
The current exhibition at GiG, shows two of Justina Becker’s older paintings together with a new body of work. One seems at first a straightforwardly abstract, but gives the illusion of a painting shrunk and stretched, the other, consisting of strips of canvas wrapped tightly like a bandage around a stretcher, utilises this double gesture of hiding and revealing. They provide a kind of framework for the new work, a complex installation of hanging window frames, made specifically for the exhibition room at GiG. The wooden windows frames are old, perhaps antique, but with none of the antique’s preciousness. They have been removed and replaced with something better and less rickety, glass taken out, the wood still having some kind of value, even if just as kindling for the fire. These frames have been partially painted by the artist in sympathetic colours and rehanged in the space no longer as windows, or even as architectural elements that would divide the room, but simply for themselves, in their best light. Justina Becker’s work takes on here an almost theatrical element, but the stage she sets is curiously not for us, the viewer, awaiting some kind of grand spectacle. The room in its theatricality is now left for the objects to be in.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2019
GiG 