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Entering the space, big black intertwining leaves, connected through aerial roots, hover in the air and take up the space, from wall to wall. The viewer is surrounded by Monstera, a beautiful and yet menacing work made out of paper, tape, wire and nylon; it is inspired by a tropical plant well known within 50s and 60s interiors and lobbies, but that has here taken on an abstract and suspended quality. The viewer thus enters the space of the drawing, which changes as he moves against the white walls. Shifting between organic or mineral structures and cosmic representation, it also plays with an ambiguity of aggressive appearance and extreme fragility. |
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Expanded Drawing – Franziska Furter
Entering the space, big black intertwining leaves, connected through aerial roots, hover in the air and take up the space, from wall to wall. The viewer is surrounded by Monstera, a beautiful and yet menacing work made out of paper, tape, wire and nylon; it is inspired by a tropical plant well known within 50s and 60s interiors and lobbies, but that has here taken on an abstract and suspended quality. The viewer thus enters the space of the drawing, which changes as he moves against the white walls. Shifting between organic or mineral structures and cosmic representation, it also plays with an ambiguity of aggressive appearance and extreme fragility.
A similar ambiguity is visible in the artist’s two-dimensional works on paper: the large-scale explosions and light-flooded landscapes hide more than they show, and the reversed night skies remind more of micro-cosmic structures than infinity. They all fluctuate between restrained unobtrusiveness and penetrating imperiousness. Colors are reduced to black and white, no twilight left. Sizes shift and it’s uncertain where the ground ends and the sky starts, if ever there is a ground. And then, of course, there are the titles of the works that play against the visible object and often turn one’s perception upside-down once again.
“Franziska Furter pushes the term ‘drawing’ into new directions, which have little to do with the original meaning of ‘disegno,’ but are rather the products of a multiple media transformation. In her work, drawing means translation rather than invention—from one medium into another, from one dimension into the next.” It’s in a process of copying, scanning, enlarging and drawing that Franziska Furter mixes references from mangas, book illustrations and the internet. Images come from one reality and are transformed into another. Yet, the reproduction process is still visible in the blown-up dot screen of the original print. Close up, the often-photographic drawings become an abstract structure.
The three-dimensional works, reduced in material and colors, evoke thoughts about material density and elude the eye’s focus; thousands of knots of nylon thread are glued to a spiky black hole, and a little ball of only five centimeters in diameter radiates with hundreds of black wooden sticks.
