Seeing Is Believing, 2024
Group exhibition
Opening Sat, 24 February 2024, 18:00h-21:00h
Wed 28 February - Fri 15 March 2024
at de Filippo Contemporary, hosted by Galería Nueva, Calle de Alejandro Sánchez 94, Carabanchel, 28019 Madrid
Dimitrina Sevova, Innerfaces, group exhibition Seeing Is Believing at de Filippo Contemporary hosted by Galería Nueva. Photos courtesy of the artist, some by Sève Favre
Dimitrina Sevova, Innerfaces, 2023/2024
The works of Dimitrina Sevova on display are selected from her recent series titled Innerfaces, for which the starting point is Walter Benjamin’s psychogeographic practices of the urban flâneur “botanising on the asphalt.” The artist undertakes it as a practice of experimenting on the street directly with raw clay, and it becomes a metaphor for the poetic surface of the inorganic and the natural world that mutually entangle, unfolding a pattern with the performative character of the experience embodied in clay. Walking and exploring the surroundings, Sevova collected traces, giving the material a direct sense and context. The flâneur is a rather male figure, an intellectual dandy whose urban strolls takes him downtown. The artist appropriates it as a female roaming the suburban environment of Zurich using clay to document her encounter with found objects instead of a notebook or camera. The intention is to see how a ball of clay can be thrown into daily life.
In this series of works, mundane things of daily life evoke the image of history and myths as mental states, which appear in a moment of present danger, in an ecology of practice walking with wonder through their maze. The clay pieces, pressed by the artist and affected by gravity, form a constellation of amorphic fragments, variations cut in the smallest detail, carrying over techniques of montage which are not only a cinematic but also a sculptural method. The fragments, found and abstracted like the re-collection of a broken vessel glued back together, rather make for a new creation connecting disjointed parts in new correspondences through play.
An ephemeral painted wall with dehydrated, pigmented raw clay, interplays with the architecture, brings particular site-specificity to works otherwise made in different spatio-temporal conditions, and works as a counter-point to the inertness of the ceramic objects, juxtaposing two stages of the same material. It works not only to grab the eye of the viewer in a spider’s net but immerses them.
Group exhibition, Seeing Is Believing, 2024, opening 24 February 2024. Flyer