'After White' Artist's Talk Michaela Zimmer with Federica Torgano

Fold Gallery is proud to present After White a collaborative show comprising painting, sculptural intervention and performance.

There is a physical awareness of spatial conditions that is as much the origin as it is the content of Michaela Zimmer’s work. While her paintings strive to resolve issues of corporeal energy in a visceral sense, her collaboration with dance is based on a mutual understanding of physical expression. Elements of performance are utilized to construct her work; continuous painted lines, applied in one stroke, with dashes and reflections that often produce multiple layers and make up a surface that is fluid but also precise. Designating the studio as a site of private ritual, Michaela Zimmer is known for layered compositions on canvas coupling the traditions of painting and drawing with unconventional materials.

In After White Zimmer has invited Peter Welz, who for this collaboration, has designed a hybrid between an architectural device and a sculpture. The architectural structure divides the gallery in a manner that references modernism, not only presenting an obstacle, but also a means for the structure to interact with the painting. Sometimes the structure cuts into a view of a painting – sometimes it acts as a strut to support one. Welz and Zimmer invite the viewer to walk around and interact physically with the paintings and structure, to view them from different angles; in a sense choreographing the movement of the viewer, making them become a performative part of the work.

Welz’s interest in motion and architecture started from his first collaboration with choreographer William Forsythe for the installation Retranslation | Final Unfinished Portrait (Francis Bacon), presented at the Musée du Louvre in Paris in 2005. In this work the human body harmonizes, intersects and inserts itself perfectly into the piece as a gestural expression - an interaction with body and object is continued and expanded upon for After White.