Orbital Displacements

Interlacings

In the current exhibition at Galeria Zipper, artist Ana Holck presents four new series of sculptures, titled ‘Suspensos’ (Suspended), ‘Expansíveis’ (Expandables), ‘Axiomas’ (Axioms) and ‘Laçados’ (Lassoed), made of stainless steel strip spring and ceramics, attached to a wall or suspended. Continuing the research she presented in the exhibition ‘Entroncados, enroscados e estirados’ (Converged, Entangled and Stretched, at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, in 2023), the artist explores the three-dimensionality of the line in space and its expansive power through drawing, which has been a kind of guiding principle in her work since the 2000s.

Thanks to her background in architecture, Holck has always been drawn to urban structures and construction sites, from which she would take forms that she transformed into sculptures and installations through exercises in rearticulation. Using prefabricated or pre-moulded elements, often in concrete, her works subverted the utilitarian character of these simple, serial forms and occupied space in an unusual way. Bridge structures, pavements and towers were transformed into new objects that simulated improbable constructions made of industrial materials.

Through an act of displacement, the artist created sculptures that established new designs in space. The transit between urban space and art space opened up the possibility of a new perception of these elements, above all a certain lightness in these brutal structures, which normally go unnoticed in city life. At the same time, the evidence of autonomous forms disconnected from their original purpose pointed towards an experience of permanent destruction that is familiar to inhabitants of large cities: the existence of landscapes made from the carcasses of abandoned constructions. They are hollow structures whose ruins resemble urban skeletons on display. In this sense, her works combine a roughness and a beauty that provoke the viewer.

In her current sculptures, the artist uses elements that are lighter and can be directly manipulated, such as ceramic tubes that she herself produces in the studio, that function as fixed nodes that structure the steel lines in space. On the one hand, the aseptic appearance of prefabricated materials and their corresponding serial rationality still prevails. On the other hand, these visual qualities are minimised by an allusion to the loose gesturality of expanding circular forms. The lines floating in space in the form of metallic arches (at times regular, at other times suggesting a more chaotic development), result from an invisible point of equilibrium between the force of the spring and the retention of the ceramic tubes, as if we are witnessing a subtle dance between two opposing movements.

Ana Holck’s recent works underline and reinvent her relationship with the tradition of constructivist sculpture, updating the thinking on the Möbius strip and its continuous circularity; as well as its developments in Brazilian art with the invention of the neoconcrete organic line and the respective reversibility between the exterior and interior of sculptural spatiality. However, by resorting to rigid materials, stretched by an anonymous and direct gesture, these works also point to a questioning of the modern belief in the docile and fluid malleability of nature and the world, marking the turning point at which we, as a society, find ourselves today.

[Taisa Palhares]