Mark your calendars! This Thursday Feb 2nd Fine Art faculty Andrea Geyer opens her solo exhibition, plein-air, at Hales New York. Congratulations Andrea! See you there!
opening reception Thursday Feb 2nd, 6-8pm
547 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011
https://halesgallery.com/
Excerpt from the press release:
Geyer’s work ranges across multiple media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. She explores the complex politics of time, in the context of specific social and political situations, cultural institutions and historical events. Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the construction of histories and ideas that are otherwise marginalized or obscured.
A child of so-called “War Children” (individuals born in the 1930s in Germany), Geyer grew up in the mountainous region of the Black Forest. Coming of age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the artist experienced the employment of “memory culture” as a strategy for reckoning with the country’s violent history, raising a collective consciousness of the past to create a vantage point for the present. Deeply shaped by this cultural condition, Geyer insists on the dangers of ignoring difficult histories, as the ideologically driven omissions of the past can lead to an inevitably volatile present.
In both of the works on view at Hales, never yet and plein-air (both 2023), Geyer takes the German forest of her childhood as a framework to explore the ways in which fascist ideologies draw on notions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ for their dissemination. From the turn of the 20th century to present-day, the forest has been exploited by white supremacists to justify constructs of Social Darwinism, the nuclear family, and binary gender norms. At the same time, Geyer shares her childhood experience of the forest’s indifference to human norms and desires, inviting viewers to be aware not only of the ideological thickets of fascism, but also the forest’s continuous, potent resilience.
