Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present JITTERS, a summer group show of works by Christian Franzen (b. 1994), Eiko Gröschl (b. 1992), Siobhan McClure (b. 1955), and Elsa Rouy (b. 2000) on view from June 26, 2024 through August 9, 2024.
JITTERS is a study of how we withstand time, grapple with a geographic sense of unease, sift through the stillness of the mundane, and sit through the restlessness within a contorted body. The paintings in this exhibition evoke muses of the habitual and examine a sense of otherworldly loss, perhaps real or imagined. Each artist respectively explores space and time through an anticipatory lens.
McClure's paintings are more than visual narratives. They are concentrated depictions that poignantly illustrate the destruction of a natural world and the dislocation of its remaining inhabitants: eerily masked children and domestic animals. McClure's practice evokes a sense of home as a concept rather than a structure. Her images, filled with domestic shrapnel, challenge the viewer's understanding of the locale.
Franzen's dreamlike paintings depict a quality of light as much as they imagine the point at which a specific part of the Southern California coastline disintegrates into the Pacific. This dissolution of landscape into atmosphere is evocative of Whistler’s infamous Nocturnes , in which visual phenomena seem to evaporate into abstracted carriers of feeling. Layered onto the glow of light and water are reflections of objects from Franzen’s studio: gossamer renderings of mementos and found objects, carriers of personal narrative.
In two of Gröschl's paintings, a stork is a meditation on something cyclical, a life cycle, and reimagining of loss's impermanence. Gröschl gestures towards the uncanny beauty of nature and unrest. In a still-life painting and another of a figure grappling with a parachute, he reminds us that these flowers will eventually wilt. Although the parachute once brought one to safety, what does remain is a looming implication of struggle and mortality.
In one of Rouy's works, a figure clutches at her body and stares vacuously at something beyond. These bodies appear vulnerable, preoccupied, and even asleep; her psychologically charged works preserve a genuine tenderness that is without match. Through a mutual intrusion of sorts, Rouy provokes and challenges her viewers, rendering us, in effect, powerless and disarmed.