Exhibition
Born in Copenhagen in 1979 and trained as a painter and sculptor, Saskia Te Nicklin conceives spatial installations and collages with which she experimentally and playfully fathoms the possibilities offered by different media. A certain amateurism she deliberately relies on partly lends her works a naïve and absurd touch that helps the artist navigate through charged thematic fields and socio-cultural complexes.
Te Nicklin’s language as an artist is characterized by unexpected combinations of materials and unusual techniques. Her paintings and installations relate to her everyday life and gender-specific experiences on the one hand and to her study of literary texts such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray or authors like Annie Dillard on the other.
The installation the garden, some leftovers, and us swaying, especially developed for the presentation in Schwaz, confronts visitors with grotesquely fantastic creatures, hybrids of wood glue and paint on larger-than-life aluminum panels populating the gallery rooms. The slightly reflective panels of Te Nicklin’s intervention directly address and stagger the viewers’ spatial perception.
Saskia Te Nicklin’s work focuses on the microcosm of the family and the macrocosm that surrounds and informs it. The artist introduces her show with a passage by the American author and poet Annie Dillard. Dillard, who followed the tracks of Henry David Thoreau in the 1970s, has become known for her radically poetic style and ecological spirituality: “When you scratch the varying behaviors and conditions behind reproductive isolation, you find, ultimately, geographical isolation. Once the isolation has occurred, of course, forms harden out, enforcing reproductive isolation, so that pintail ducks will never mate with snapdragons.”
Text: Cosima Rainer
Photos © Verena Nagl
