Notes on
Cycle Carpets
Anna Slobodnik
„[Ornament] is the babble of painting.“ – Adolf Loos
I
A pattern is a perfect representation of a surface, because unlike with a motivic image, one cannot look into the pattern as into a window, further more it always represents the surface on which it is based, in all its variability. The carpet pattern heightens this relationality of the pattern to its ground all the more, since it not only relates to the carpet surface as such, but is also self-contained, finds an end with the carpet edge and cannot be continued into infinity beyond the edges of what is depicted, as other ornaments do.
The carpet or the carpet pattern is therefore ideally suited for an examination of the realexisting pictorial space and its requirements as such.
II
A carpet lies on the floor.
A carpet hangs on the wall.
A carpet hangs on the wall, goes to the floor, is stapled to the corners and extends further so that a part of it, like the first carpet, lies on the floor.
An image of a carpet hangs on the wall.
III
What happens when the image and the interior become intertwined? Besides the exhibition, the image is most often encountered in the interior, where it meets other interior objects and is perceived as on of them. But what happens when we put the interior object, whose use or application precedes its existence as an image, into an exhibition context -more precisely, into the context of contemporary visual art- and thus shift the attention of the viewer to the image aspects of carpets/wallpapers/tiles?
IV
Similar to the pattern-bearing objects, the pattern itself is not only a cultural technique, it can rather act as a disseminator and carrier of cultures and traditions. Thus, we connect and associate different geopolitical moments with certain ornaments/patterns and, conversely, we can trace the shifts and developments of historical and current cultures through the historical tracing of developments of certain ornaments and patterns.
V
Patterned objects are not only objects of the interior and bearers of cultural markers, they are also objects of the house and thus still associated with the house as a household and the woman as the person responsible for the household. Ornaments and patterns not only have an aesthetically feminine moment attached to them, but their production is also associated with women, whereas for centuries painting was a domain reserved primarily for men.
*1990 in Moscow, lives in Berlin
Anna Slobodnik was a Masters’ student of Prof. Mark Lammert, UdK Berlin (2016). She has won Schulz Stübner Foundation Prize (2016) and received a scholarship Prize for Young Art, Kunstverein Centre Bagatelle (2018). Exhibitions include: Painting Painting Painting, Raum Vollreinigung, Berlin (2019), Galerie Didier Devillez (2018), Brussels, Druck_Sache, Kommunale Galerie Pankow, Berlin (2018), Schulz Stübner Foundation Prize Exhibition, Grevenbroich (solo, 2017).
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