Duration’s Wisdom
Press Release – 2003
The Mourning After, an exhibition of process based paintings and drawings by Erika Knerr opens Thursday, April 3 at Lance Fung Gallery. This is the second New York solo exhibition for Knerr, who has been showing with the gallery since 1998. The Mourning After includes six paintings that visualize the emotions tied to six stages of mourning and recovery: “Blinding Shock”, “Utopian Anger”, “Grief’s Domain”, “Coping Dance”, “Memory’s Touch” and “Duration’s Wisdom.” Also shown are the large drawings on paper and six square wooden floor panels made to develop the image for each stage of mourning. The forms create a visual flow through the grieving process and suggest that in the end the stages merge into each other, not having a clear beginning and end.
The paintings and drawings of The Mourning After are a brave attempt to explore the powerful emotional reconnaissance enveloping the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. They were made in New York City surrounded with the inevitable threat of war and terror. “Blinding Shock” is almost completely black. Duration’s Wisdom was made on the floor, by using a long paintbrush, dipping it in black ink, placing it on the canvas and walking around the painting, creating a long circular, continuous line. Redipping the brush whenever needed, “I simply walked as long as I could around and around the canvas until I could walk no longer.”
The exhibition explores pure emotion with the materiality of painting through personal experience. The paintings are black, white and gray ink and pigment, in order to focus on an internal image that is beneath the surface. A place that is raw and basic that would be made insignificant with color. The images reference the chest cavity, the place in the body where strong emotion lies. The paintings aim to document the movement of feeling through the body. The result approaches modernist techniques reminiscent of abstract expressionism, yet are about something very different. Rather than being about paint, or simply the end of painting, they are infused with an emotive touch. The work alludes to the dialogue with the “Death of Painting,” debated in the 1980s, which is being reexamined again today.
Ms. Knerr is previously known for another emotionally charged work Marking Time, first seen at Lance Fung Gallery in 2000. For that project she interpreted the universal theme of longing for a child, and marking of time and material. Through this ritual installation, the artist sewed together process painting squares, muslin, and antique quilting squares to create an 1150 square foot cloth structure. She suspended the “quilt” from the ceiling, creating a womb like environment, exploring societies of women, time and fertility and the mothering process behind personal sacrifice.
