Tate Britain Clore Galleries
20 November 2004 – 6 March 2005
Internationally recognised for her atmospheric reproductions of landscapes within glass vitrines, Mariele Neudecker uses sculpture, film and photography to create a sometimes playful frisson between historical cultural representations of the sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of the reality of experience. The exhibition is a conceptual counterpoint to the geometry of David Nash’s abstract sculpture and highlights the artist’s investigation of the romantic sublime within the Cornish context. Mariele Neudecker Over and Over, Again and Again opens to the public 20 May 2004.
Neudecker has included two new vitrine works for this exhibition; There Go I (2004) and Over and Over, Again and Again (2004), commissioned by the Met Office for Elemental Insight. Both works display jagged mountain ranges cloaked in the perpetual fog and snow of her chemical compositions. Another Day (2001) is a mesmerising record of the simultaneous rising and setting of the sun on opposite ends of the globe; South East Australia and the Western Azores, displayed on a double-sided lightbox. The work examines the fine line between reality and fiction, the mythological imaginary and the everyday – the natural and the supernatural, representation and perception. Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) is a series of 24 short films commissioned by The Contemporary Art Society, for Leeds City Art Gallery, as a filmic response to Schubert’s song cycle, an iconic work from the German Romantic ‘Lieder’ tradition. Neudecker has created a film for each of the 24 movements using locations based on the sixtieth degree of latitude that experience snow-scaped winters; the Shetland Island’s, Helsinki, Oslo and St. Petersburg.
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1965 Neudecker has lived and worked in the UK since 1985. In her work she explores landscapes; from photographs, postcards, experience and memories. This exhibition in the Cornish context, focuses on the element of the German Romantic Tradition and prompts the viewer to consider how in relating to the natural world, the resulting concept of landscape has become a vehicle for emotional transcendence, philosophical contemplation and cultural identity.
An illustrated catalogue with essays by David Blayney Brown, Senior Curator at Tate Britain, and writer and composer Douglas Young, is available from the gallery shop (price £8.95).