Johanna Seidel: Sovereign Lands like no one's listening

CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing

2024.04.13-2024.05.17

   CLC Gallery Venture presents "Sovereign Lands like no one's listening", Johanna Seidel's first exhibition in Asia, showcasing some twenty recent paintings the artist has created since autumn 2023.

   Seidel was born in 1993 and is currently based inDresden, Germany. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden with a diploma in 2021, mentored by artists includingPeter Bömmelsand Anne Neukamp. Seidel has since 2014 developed a painting practice that is poetic in essence, dealing with the nature of perceived realities. Juxtaposing the urban and the natural into coherent backgrounds, Seidel brings female protagonists to the fore, depicting allegorical scenes that involve both intimate, personal narratives and mythic, surreal elements, sublimating quotidian snippets into messages that resonate universally.

   For the exhibition "Sovereign Lands like no one's listening", Seidel considers the thematic issue of sovereignty, exploring the tangibility of safety, security, solitude and affection in art and life. The titular large-scale painting, finished in 2024, features a reclining female figure in a private chamber, decorated with a delicate orchestration of artefacts. From the large window that looks out to the rather ominous outdoor sight of a withered tree at twilight, the hand-bird that references Czech surrealist Toyen's vigilant creature, a miniatured version ofThe Hunters in the Snow(1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, to the toy horse and shelled pearl by the character's feet, the richly coded setting pertains less to an esoteric story than to an imagination of an ideal state one may construct for herself: a tower or palace of one's own, erected upon principles of privacy, (in)visibility, intimacy, protectiveness, against an unembellished view of what is outside and beyond.

   The particularly graphic, flat composition ofFrom a Shell(2024) echoesSovereign Lands like no one's listening, in its delineation of a cocoon-like domestic environment. Referencing one of the seven fabled "The Unicorn Tapestries" from the Middle Ages on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, it is less atmospheric and theatrical as it relies more on a balanced distribution of pictorial space and colours, also making explicit allusions to an exteriority that visits or intrudes. Seidel presents a number of her paintings as auto-fictions—works that are at once biographical and fictional—applying at times a unique form of auto-voyeurism in her compositions to reexamine art history. Examples include double-framedTowards the Center(2024) orTo belong to oneself and the world(2024), also on view in the current exhibition. By assuming and subverting the role of a voyeur who intently watches and seemingly objectifies her own personas, Seidel acknowledges and reveals an internalised male gaze, pondering voyeurism as an alternative relationship to one's self.

   Seidel's medium-sized and small paintings can be considered excerpts from larger pieces, offering an opportunity to reexamine favourite motifs or to explore compositional potential. Paintings such asI want to take this with me(2024),Being a Vessel (II)(2023) andContained(2023) show objects that become internal frames, floating against an indefinite, atmospheric background;Roadrunner (Love me tender)(2024),Meadows(2024),Wind(2024),Hoping for Rain or a watery Eye(2023) and others emphasise the textural qualities of Seidel's painterly art, as well as her interest in off-centred, unbalanced compositional fragments.Allure(2024),Allure (II)(2024) andWillow(2024) form a suite that is particularly cinematic. Integrating popular culture references that introduce mythological elements into contemporary life, these paintings demonstrate Seidel's intent to retain a kind of juvenile cheesiness in her art—a sincere, unironic yet playful approach.

   Although Seidel does not ride motorcycles, she has since 2018 made a series of paintings that gear their protagonists with different models of heavy and powerful bikes or cars.Nightclouds(2023) on view in the exhibition features predominantly a bike rider who is breaking a way out on a field of flowers. Evidently a dream-scene in which elements are emergent and fleeting, the large painting essentially portrays a dialectic of speed and empowerment with which the artist has been preoccupied: a speedy, raging industrial-cultural force almost stands still in the picture, precariously balancing in a dreamy-natural environment, which is in contrast the true embodiment of speed, quickly dissolving and evolving. Another form of velocity in relation tosovereigntyis also discernible throughout the exhibition: Seidel's young, relatable characters—working as part-time waitresses, sleeping in after a night out, jogging with a friend, or showing off fancy shoes—are growing, are in the process of expediting an exit out of the present moment, and are, by extension, becoming sovereign beings in work and play.

   Johanna Seidel (b. 1993, Germany) is a visual artist based in Dresden, Germany. Seidel received her MFA at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. Recent exhibitions include: "The Second Body", Soho Revue, London (2024); "What my Sisters taught me", She BAM! Galerie Laetitia Gorsy,Leipzig(2023); "Control Group: In a Prism-Like Sight", CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing (2023); "Azul Celeste", Artistellar Gallery, London(2022), and "Nocturne", Galerie Mellies, Detmold(2022).