The world we live in at the moment suddenly no longer seems “without alternative”. Young people are gluing themselves to airfields, crowds are gathering for demonstrations against the far right. A generally recognised sense of crisis is forcing society to move and challenging us to face up to the problem areas we have identified in a constructive and visionary way – and to take a stand against them. These developments are embedded in the discourses of a contemporary society that is shaping itself as progressive, in which the dynamic momentum of technological and scientific developments is always linked to the dynamics of exchanging and negotiating thoughts and statements.
The Berlin artist Nadine Fecht understands her art from the outset and fundamentally as part of this politically and socially relevant area of activity. And so it is only logical that she places this abstract and complex field of open discourse at the centre of her current group of works MULTITUDE – Die Vielen als Viele (trans. The Many as Many).
On four large-format, immensely moved (and moving) sheets that create a next space when placed in the room, she presents the traces of an open and largely uncontrolled drawing process that understands its results as provisional states: The form itself indicates that the sheet under consideration has developed from a previous state and will lead towards a further state. These snapshots thus represent a complex model of the sometimes monstrously confusing discourse practices of our society. Fecht, who has already been committed to unstable intermediate states in her earlier works, also finds her way here to translate the moved momentum of dynamic processes into an artistic form: as the viewer’s gaze does not come to rest within the picture surfaces, but rather enters into a temporally unlimited circling, the space expands and opens up for reflections and discussions of what is shown.
The MULTITUDE sheets are an antipodal reference to an earlier group of works by the artist. Whereas in Jedes Kollektiv braucht eine Richtung (2011–2013) it was primarily the directed movement of an almost monochrome bundle of ballpoint pens previously collected on the sheet, in MULTITUDE – Die Vielen als Viele (2022/ 2024) the focus is on the colourfulness and the complex and indissoluble interconnections of the structure. The question of the possibilities of the individual within a collective or a crowd emerges in that several thousand ballpoint pens are not simply collected and set into a directed movement. Rather, they are constantly placed, bundled, moved and released in a performative act. This undirected process, largely uncontrolled by the artist, creates an almost unmanageable and multicoloured structure in which not a single trace of drawing, which is transferred to the paper by the movement of the drawing instruments, is planned or deliberately set. The pens obey themselves and unpredictably out of the context and their connection.
By dissolving the classical model of the expressive drawer, who extends himself as an author via the drawing instrument onto the drawing medium, Nadine Fecht gains a (playful) space in which she, as an artist, formulates and presents something on paper that nevertheless bears her signature in its super-personality. This is a new practice of drawing that abandons the classical concept of drawing only to expand it. Perhaps comparable to Jackson Pollock’s Dribble Pictures or Ornette Coleman’s concept of Harmolodics, which is completely liberated from classical music theory. Only through this shift does Fecht succeed in creating a convincing depiction of a society that moves from within and renews itself.
Nadine Fecht: MULTITUDE – die Vielen als Viele
Sep 14 – Oct 26, 2024
Galerie Russi Klenner
Berlin, Germany
