Nicole Wendel: bebop

"Nicole Wendel's large-format core drawings suggest a space of undefined depth, in which an airy substance seems to proliferate. It almost seems as if the picture breathes. The analogy to breath is not accidental, because the entire graphic work of the Berlin based artist is closely related to body functions and activities, which she often shows in performance settings together with other partners.
In Wendel's drawings, we see spontaneous marks of the body resulting from performance actions (clearly recognizable, for example, are footprints). We also see carefully placed layers of lines, often parallel, either drawn precisely as if drawn by ruler or put in a gestural manner. Sometimes those lines are so thin that they remind us of engravings on an etching plate. There are also linearly delimited areas whose diffuse background stands out in brightness or texture from the surroundings, giving the impression of superimposed transparent foils. The spatiality of these techniques may evoke the spreading of sounds: the association with the sphere of music derives from specific elements of Wendel's drawing where she seems to pick up forms of notations of a graphic score.
Straight horizontal lines support the composition in an architectural manner.

Here again we can see how Nicole Wendel evokes the body as an architectural structure that she seeks to uncover with artistic means. Wendel follows motifs and intentions rooted in Susan Klein's somatic bodywork - important also for well-known choreographers as Trisha Brown and Sasha Waltz - with its concept of the body as a natural (architectural) formation, a formation that is in turn translated in sequences of movements, whose order is specific for each individual.

Thus, the reference to the performative not only consists in the body's spontaneous prints and marks, but also in the meticulously balanced, sometimes very finely drawn elements. Everything carries the mark of human gestures. Like the movements of dance, these gestures can be carried out very quickly, ejecting the physical energy impetuous, or very slowly in a meditative manner.
Nicole Wendel's work sounds out the gestural with its major role in non-figurative painting, in the thorough research that she carries out in the medium of drawing and that she combines with elements of constructive abstraction. In her smaller drawings she isolates the various elements that one finds interwoven on the large sheets into complex structures. Parallel adjacent or circling lines and strokes are next to geometric figures and wiped parts. Different directions and dynamic relationships of the elements are the artist's methods of drawing by which she captures a kinetic space.
Both in the smaller and in the large formats, the conventional contrast between surface and depth is consistently undermined. Everything takes place on the surface that is charged in a complex manner. The surface offers itself as the setting for multi-layered processes in the most literal sense, while at the same time becoming an imaginary space, a kind of resonance space that the artist explores, as well as in her own body, which she transfers onto and into the picture."

© Ludwig Seyfarth 2018

At the opening of the exhibition on 1.st February at Galerie1214 (Berlin), the artist choreographes the live performance bebop (from 7:30 pm to about 8:15 pm) with the dancers Johanna Ackva, Johanna Faber, Even Foster and Michael Ludwig.