Smolka Contemporary is pleased to announce our participation at Art Düsseldorf with a solo presentation by Uli Aigner in the “Retromania” section.

“Retromania”

Uli Aigner is showing three large-format coloured pencil drawings and an installation with ONE MILLION porcelain vessels.

The new drawings show motifs that seem to follow an archaeological canon of forms. Uli Aigner distils and unites humans, animals, plants and vessels in the lines. The drawings reflect the forms and stories of prehistoric cultures – humanity at the beginning of its development.

Slowly and quickly, in layers or only as isolated lines, a moving pictorial surface between ornamental and representational emerges. This series of drawings trace the subconscious, the recognisable and, above all, the common in the world around us.

For the first time, the artist is also presenting a specially developed porcelain frame, consisting of 16 porcelain parts, produced with the support of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) Berlin. A screenprint edition was also created based on the drafts for the drawing “Childhood of Humankind I”.

As a spatial installation, Uli Aigner will juxtapose approximately 30 ONE MILLION vessels from a new edition with the drawings. ONE MILLION is Uli Aigner’s larger-than-life analog-digital project that she started in 2014, for which she produces chronologically numbered, individualised porcelain vessels on the potter’s wheel and digitally archives their distribution on a world map.

The shapes of these vessels bridge archaeological artefacts and artificial intelligence (AI), as this new vessel edition is based on templates that were designed by an AI. Aigner’s new artist book entitled BE SILENT TOUCH LOOK SWALLOW on her project with AI forms will be on display alongside the installation.

In her work, Uli Aigner sets a deliberate counterpoint to the ephemeral tendencies of our time. She creates each vessel and each drawing by hand, deliberately and intuitively. It is an exploration of our common history. Uli Aigner shows how craftsmanship, technology and the resulting timeless forms and functions have been handed down for thousands of years, are deeply rooted in humankind’s past and can be found in the present. She is tracing the theme of “retromania” all the way back to its origins.

Uli Aigner was born in Gaming, Lower Austria in 1965 and has been living in Berlin since 2011.

From October 2022 to May 2023, Uli Aigner’s exhibition “The Porcelain Code” was on view in the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island. Aigner placed her works as multimedia interventions in the form of film, installation, monumental porcelain vessels and sculpture between the vessels in the collection of the Museum for Pre- and Early History, creating a dialogue between contemporary art and artefacts from the early periods of human history.

Further information about the fair at art-dus.de.

Photos (c) Tom McCallie

Location

Booth F08
Areal Böhler
Hansaallee 321
40549 Düsseldorf

When

12.04. – 14.04.2024

Artists

• Uli Aigner