Ivana Franke

Gallery Niklas Belenius is pleased to present the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Ivana Franke.

There is a story about a certain optical phenomena that happens while looking at someone, or yourself in the mirror long enough, at some point, this person´s image disappears, dissolves into a fog. Ephemerality of appearances and finitude of forms and the way they are experienced, understood and responded to or simply made in time are frequent topics in Ivana Franke´s work.

The series of drawings presented in this exhibition – Thinking dimensions (n-cube) – speak about the process of slowly getting lost in complex abstract counter-intuitive conceptions of space, represented through several projection graphs. These graphs are used in visualizing structures of the higher dimensional regular polytopes. In each drawing one dimension is added, the addition of lines unfold further spaces and the lines multiply until they finally become happily raveled or blur together.

Franke´s work investigates the concept of visibility and space. The sculptural piece Boxed-in infinite polyhedron is an object made of transparent acrylic glass and is a fragment of space filling polyhedra, which is in theory, by mathematical definition infinite. The rigid materiality and solidity of the object is partially canceled out by the transparency and reflectivity of the acrylic glass as they bring forth an encounter with many faces simultaneously. Reflections follow the viewers pace of movement and extend the gaze in time, while empty space and reified volume exchange in perception.

Tensegrity wall is a construction made of steel rods connected with thin wire that engraves the space. The large-scale installation physically divides the gallery, breaks the shortest path, and directs the visitors movement. At the same time it opens the space into itself, into multiply new spaces inside of it. The construction could be used for measuring through the space – the distance between you and me at the moment, as it renders spatial relations visible.

Her exhibitions include P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; the Venice Architecture Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; the Venice Biennale; Reykjavik Experiment Marathon; Manifesta 7

Ivana Franke was born in 1973 in Zagreb and she currently lives and works in Berlin.