KARLA MARCHESI
BIOGRAPHY
Berlin based Karla Marchesi has Bachelor of Fine Art (2004) and Honours in Fine Art (2007) degrees from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, where she received the University Medal for academic excellence and the Honours Thesis Prize. Marchesi received the Philip Bacon Galleries Prize for Excellence in Drawing in 2003, enabling her to study for a semester at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, US.
Marchesi has held solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. In 2012 she undertook a studio residency at Atelierhaus Mengerzeile, Berlin that preceeded her first international solo exhibition at Kunsthalle M3, Berlin. She has subsequently participated in a number of international group exhibitions in Germany, Luxembourg and the USA and held solo exhibitions in Berlin, Luxembourg and Singapore.
Marchesi is a recipient of the 1st Prize in the Redland Art Awards (2010), the Wilson Visual Arts Award (2012) and an Australia Council for the Arts Early Career New Work Grant (2013). Her work is included in a number of public collections including The University of Queensland Art Museum, the Museum of Brisbane, the Australian Catholic University and several regional galleries.
ARTIST CV
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WORKS
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PAST EXHIBITIONS
SLOW IS SMOOTH, SMOOTH IS FAST
4 TO 21 OCTOBER 2023
The garden is overgrown and lit only by the torches of a search party. Human life may be absent here but there is life to be found indeed. Remnants of metallic material are snagged in branches. Once belonging to a rescue blanket they now morph, over an indecipherable stretch of time into chrysalises. These cocoons extend an invitation of renewal and self-correction if given the time and conditions to do so.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Nature plays a long game.
The exhibition Slow is Smooth, Smooth is fast at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, October 4th-21st, takes its title from a phrase coined by the US Marine Corps, referring to methodical and steady mission tactics. Though for me it expresses a poetry of relational time and physics. This exhibition extends from my most recent show, Cruise Control Death Drive at Bark Gallery Berlin, September 8th-October 6th 2023.
Bookended by two-shows, these series question the limitations of looking to solutions for crises within systems which bore their creation.
Through an art historical lens, my work refracts the socio-cultural anxieties of our age, critiquing what it means to be human at this present moment, under conditions of late capitalism and Anthropocentrism. Here I interweave allegoric deconstruction of ideological systems with autobiography, pathos and humour. In recent years I’ve been drawn to the ‘Impossible Bouquet’ popularised in 17th century Dutch Still Life painting. Secular merchants championed this genre, where every bloom is unseasonably bountiful: A simulacrum of nature. I am attracted to its symbolic ability to stand in for market-capitalism and Western worldviews.
Cruise Control Death Drive explores the relationship between human-made climate change, western epistemology and the psychological death-drive of our species. Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast responds in its wake.
17th century Still Lifes espoused nature as possessable. 19th century Industrialists saw it as extractable. German Romantics saw nature as a mirror to the individualised self, gazing upon mountaintops and violent seas for moments of self-conscious humility: an 18th century selfie if you will.
#awestruck
Sped up and amplified these imperial systems blithely drive a highway to existential destruction – blinkered by hubris. Disabling cruise control and sharply turning left seems inconceivable within the constructs of modern life. To paraphrase Žižek it’s easier imagine end of the world than the end of capitalism.
You are invited to venture off-road and consider the generative possibility of non-human ontologies.
Here I paint complex entanglements of multi-genus flora in hyper-natural, Post-Humanist scenes. In reimagined ecosystems non-human subjects are presented as heroic and embodied with agency. Conflating laws of time, biology and chemistry, these non-human protagonists display a potential for infinite adaptation, mutation and hybridity. They blend existing and fantastical botanical species within landscapes unsettled by the forces of eerie weather phenomena. Picture the convergence of desert and oceanic landscapes, tidal expanses and alpine summits, all overgrowing the remnants of a bygone anthropocentric world. In their place, new organic monuments rise.
Within this paradoxical horror and delight there lies hope, to imagine a new future: one not in fear of change, but of possibility and generative co-creation – which is evitable with or without us.
Karla Marchesi, 2023
EXHIBITION REVIEW
THE AGE: SPECTRUM, SATURDAY 14 OCTOBER 2023
Within the tremendous visual power of her flora paintings, their vivacity and particularity, Karla Marchesi gives us nature in all its beauty and potential monstrosity. Across 14 oil paintings, the Berlin-based, Brisbane-born artist has created still life floral scenes that have the uncanny shock of a dream. They are delightful but also skewed and mutating. Across a hazy pastel background (Marchesi is a master of using colour to convey a strange sense of weather) is a monumental amalgamation of flowers, petals and leaves. Other paintings depict sprouting growths akin to coral; delicate pansy-like flowers in powerful orange and green-tinged succulents that expand across the canvas. Marchesi is partly referencing the ‘‘impossible bouquet’’ of 17th-century Dutch painting that featured fantastical floral arrangements that could never occur in nature. It seems timely – both hopeful and melancholic – to resurrect this genre. Marchesi shows how nature has its own forms of creation beyond humans, conveying how mighty and inventive this is.
Tiarney Miekus
SUGAR FEVER DREAM
18 APRIL TO 15 MAY 2021
Sugar Fever Dream presents a range of hyper-natural Post-Humanist landscapes. These paintings are bowls of brightly wrapped candy, offering enticement on first glance, but may induce nausea if consumed in totality.
With an air of affirmative nihilism and a playful aesthetic of excess, Sugar Fever Dream is a counter vision to Western thought at the height of anthropocentrism. In a waking nightmare of interspecies revenge, this collection draws 17th century Still Life and Vanitas traditions into a Contemporary post-internet landscape. Employing Ecohorror tropes, Art Historical references, semiotic and autobiographical elements, the Still Lifes pulse with life. Nonhuman entities are protagonists embodied with agency, movement, menace and desire: from the skies of the heavens to the depths of the ocean floor.
My practice has long employed the still life genre as a means through which to reflect upon socio-cultural anxieties of our age. The paintings theatrically critique what it means to be human at this present moment under conditions of late capitalism and existential climate crisis, interweaving an allegoric deconstruction of ideological systems with autobiography, pathos and humour.
Here the nonhuman actors perform as guides reflecting ourselves back to ourselves, as the violence and vulnerability of our time is navigated. Tangled digital ouroboroi present visions of existential confusion. Slaughtered game rise from the dead. Octopus yearn for touch. Rock lobsters transcend the decadence of civilization in hubristic decline. Baby squid find tender shelter in a graveyard. Portals of escape are offered through digital displacements. Sugar Fever Dream beckons you to feast. Give yourself over to the belly of the beast. Laugh so much you want to cry; cry so much you have to laugh.
Karla Marchesi, 2021
TO PROCEED WITHIN A TRAP
16 JANUARY TO 10 FEBRUARY 2019
My recent practice can be described as a reflection on the quasi-religious and gender identity of the artist in the post Internet age, so to a decoding of modernity, filtered through the medium of history painting.
Drawing on a lexicon of the familiar as a means to address anxieties afflicting contemporary living, previous collections in my oeuvre examined thresholds delineating public and private worlds. Scenes of chaotic domestic interiors, suburban vistas and unruly landscapes metaphorically sought to portray the human subject in its absence. Since 2016 my practice has orientated towards the floral still life genre as a means of expression. Through use of art historical appropriation and invention recent bodies of work have utilised a tragic-comic sensibility to scrutinise sociological systems and question our historical moment. Subverting traditions of 17th century Dutch still life painting the collection entitled, After Nature, exhibited with Nicholas Thompson Gallery in 2017, applied the impossible bouquet as a stand in for nascent market-capitalism. This body of work sought to conflate relationships between nature, culture and neo-liberal economics with understated nihilist humour.
In continuation, To proceed within a trap (Nicholas Thompson Gallery, 2019) considers how we govern ourselves within a system of our own creation, constrained by personal beliefs, social mores and broader opaque ideological structures. Interrogating how our desires, anxieties and fears frame perceptions of reality this collection presents a range of psychologically laden mise-en-scenes set within a highly-aesthetic schema. Here themes of autobiography, psychology and sexuality; death and temporality; cultural constructs and geo-politics are traversed with playful irreverence and pathos. Chromatically saturated vistas and kitsch floral bouquets are depicted flanked by nightmarish swarms of birds watching menacingly or violently attacking mid-air. Depicting scenes of fraught fantastical projection this series draws on Hitchcockian horror tropes and signifiers referring to psychotherapeutic diagnosis, catholic-guilt and body-scrutiny, thereby touching on contemporary preoccupations with self-analysis and self-consciousness. Wherein works such as Guard Post and Wings of Desire, speak to an internalised anxious imagination paintings such as Freedom Fighters and Half Life broach broader subjects such as geo-political instability, surveillance and the universality of life and death.
Works created in 2017 develop a language away from the myopia of individual experience contrarily adopting a hyperopic vision of human experience. Condensing past, present and future; nature, culture and universal death, motifs of circular voids, solar eclipses, celestial bodies and black holes punctuate these later works. Paintings such as The sense of an ending (2017), Deep space, small death (2017) and Eclipse (2017) present an atheistic Vanitas, with a quiet nihilist humour. Abridging the full spectrum of human experience in to three tenets, these works flout any reference to modernity and in doing so reflect on the absurdity of our current socio-cultural landscape and the temporality of our time.
Karla Marchesi 2019
AFTER NATURE
1 TO 23 APRIL 2017
After Nature explores the possibilities of contemporary Vanitas painting. Broaching themes of death and temporality, these works reflect on conditions of contemporary living, cultural contrivances and the nature of human existence. Positing a radically condensed synopsis of human civilisation, these painting mise-en-scènes draw on tragic-comic, personal and idiosyncratic motifs alongside appropriations from art history, in lieu of traditional iconography attributed to the genre.
After Nature should be read as a body of work in search of a secular Vanitas rather than a resolved idea set. The exhibition presents two tenets of recent work: the initial iterations explore the vanities of individualism and persuasion of cultural dictates, whereas later works deviate away from the individual towards the universal.
Provoked by the Vanitas dictum, Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas ("Vanity of vanities, all is vanity), early paintings from this series such as Vanity Fair (2016), Life goals (2016) and Tension meter (2016) feature superimposed gymnasium apparatus, chains and metal poles over representations of 17th century Dutch still lifes. These impossible bouquets, a culturally constructed arrangement wherein the flora depicted cannot bloom simultaneously, allude to bourgeoning middle-class wealth and the first manifestations of market capitalism. In this body of work such bouquets act as a stand in for the absurdity and constructedness of cultural suppositions; namely measures of achievement attained by the individual, whether they ascribe to conventional beauty standards, competitive success or wealth aspirations. The inorganic punctuations formally bisecting the background vegetation allude to the impossibility of fulfilling contemporary cultural dictates with an irreverent tragicomic humour.
Works created in 2017 develop a language away from the myopia of individual experience contrarily adopting a hyperopic vision of human experience. Condensing past, present and future; nature, culture and universal death, motifs of circular voids, solar eclipses, celestial bodies and black holes punctuate these later works. Paintings such as The sense of an ending (2017), Deep space, small death (2017) and Eclipse (2017) present an atheistic Vanitas, with a quiet nihilist humour. Abridging the full spectrum of human experience in to three tenets, these works flout any reference to modernity and in doing so reflect on the absurdity of our current socio-cultural landscape and the temporality of our time.
Karla Marchesi
NEWS
KARLA MARCHESI ‘SLOW IS SMOOTH, SMOOTH IS FAST’ REVIEWED IN THE AGE BY TIARNEY MIEKUS
Nicholas Thompson Gallery, until October 21 Within the tremendous visual power of her flora paintings, their vivacity and particularity, Karla Marchesi gives us nature in all its beauty and potential monstrosity. Across 14 oil paintings, the Berlin-based, Brisbane-born artist has created still life floral scenes that have the uncanny shock of a dream. They are…
KARLA MARCHESI FINALIST IN 2023 ARTHUR GUY MEMORIAL PAINTING PRIZE AT BENDIGO ART GALLERY
Karla Marchesi is a finalist in the 2023 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at Bendigo Art Gallery Held every two years, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize attracts some of Australia’s most accomplished artists. The Prize provides Bendigo Art Gallery with the opportunity to survey a breadth of contemporary painting by established and emerging artists…
KARLA MARCHESI FEATURED IN ‘ARTIST PROFILE’ ISSUE 64
PROCESS: Karla Marchesi It’s funny that there is a psychological divorce as soon as my paintings leave the studio. My mind is already bubbling with beginnings of what to make next; what will follow from what came before. I’ve long held the view: work begets work – through the practice itself is where meaning resides.…
KARLA MARCHESI PROFILED IN VAULT MAGAZINE ISSUE 40, ARTICLE BY LOUISE MARTIN-CHEW
. Karla Marchesi is profiled in the current issue of VAULT magazine, feature by Louise Martin-Chew . “Living in Berlin, and approaching the age of 40, Karla Marchesi has found a strong female voice and the gift of time, fuelled by painterly liberation and a gutsy libido. Her new works exploit scale, humour and conceptual…