Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer- Der erweiterte Blick




Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, exhibition view, Wohnmaschine, 2007


 

March 16 - April 21, 2007

 

 

In her exhibition DER ERWEITERTE BLICK [The Expanded View], the Dutch artist Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer (born in 1967) presents a new series of panels. Here, she works with a direct relation to architecture, and explores in her creations and models, in photography, drawings, and collages the limits of inner and outer space, the relationship between detail, the fragment, and the surroundings.

 

The focal point of the exhibition is the studio window, which serves simultaneously as a membrane and a magnifying lens for the artist. On the wallpaper covering the rear gallery wall, the artist depicts a model of a studio window. This model window was built by the artist in Autumn 2003 for the exhibition ‘Galerie 1:10’ at Air de Paris, and consist of numerous convex magnifying lenses.

 

The various lenses enlarge what is seen to various degrees, and thus form in this constellation a multifaceted visual pattern. The reality beyond the window is multiplied and reproduced in a distorted way. A mosaic surface of similar microcosms emerges. Kuitenbower relates these miniature snippets to the maxim of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who said, "Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness." For the miniature, according to Bachelard, develops like a universe, in which greatness is included in miniature.

 

At the same time, the window is the interface between the outer and the inner world. The gaze of the artist can both collect analytic as well as associative observations and arrange them anew. In this way, the artist assembles for her panels pictorial fragments and visual associations conceptually, and superimposes them in the two-dimensional visual surface layer for layer, until in the entire space a plausible overlapping of motifs results, and a new miniature universe emerges.

 

Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer brings us again and again to her constructed and conceptual environments. The window serves in so doing as a site for exploring the reflexive relationship between the view and (our own) perception and directs attention to questions of physical visual processes on the one hand, and subjective mechanisms of perception and interpretation on the other.