Christina Gransow’s crayon drawings are portraits of urban architecture – she draws skyscrapers, outdoor facilities and hedge formations, but also urban furniture such as parking barriers and flower buckets.
The artist is less interested in raising a political debate of urban environments though, but rather in an impartial search for colours and shapes. Also important is the attempt to assess on its concrete appearances what is edited out of people’s perceptions and rejected by the canon of architectural history.
During the drawing process photographies made in situ intermingle with the remembered appearances of the buildings. The focus is not on factual correctness, but on a subjectively perceived object in urban space and the accentuation of its visual qualities and its colours.
Architecture and vegetation are represented as equivalent in their plentiful colours, in their structure though they are differing fundamentally. Reduced to their geometrical forms, satellite dishes and balconies become rectangles, squares, rhombs and circles.
But this is more than a purely aesthetical gauging of colours and shapes and Christina Gransow’s work is more political than its first impression suggests. In PALAST the focus lies on modern architecture of the post-war era as an attempt to put into effect the political utopia of the ideal city that promised affordable and modern living for the masses.
Today these buildings count as failed experiments and are blocked out of the popular image of a city. The discrepancy between the closeness in time of yesterday’s utopias and a contemporary sense of beauty does not allow to perceive these tower blocks as charming.
As much as a palace does not seem to be a contemporary type of building anymore either, rather a symbol for out-dated social systems and power structures. The word itself makes one think of fairy tales more than today’s political reality. But many of these post-war architectures were symbols of a euphoric new start that should create better lives for everyone.
Exhibition opening: Saturday, 03 March – 18:00 CET
Photographs:
Top by Miguel Ferraz Araújo
Middle and bottom by Max März
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Exhibition: Christina Gransow “Palast”
Opening: Saturday, 03 March 2012 | 18:00 CET
Saturday, 03 March 2012 – Saturday, 24 March 2012
enblanco Projektraum | Manteuffelstr. 73 | 10999 Berlin/Kreuzberg
christinagransow.de | enblanco.de
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