‘A Family Affair’ | Artists Anna Virnich, Winfried Virnich And David Prytz Exhibiting Together For The First Time At Artefact Berlin
The exhibition will bring together the artistic Virnich-Prytz family, and debut new site-specific paintings and sculptures, unraveling an interplay of inherent poetics in their respective practices, and exploring its manifestation through these distinctive mediums.
Opening Reception: April 23, 2024 | 5 – 8 PM On View: April 24 – July 5, 2024
Artefact Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition by the Virnich-Prytz family, unveiling a series of never-before-seen works, bringing together contemporary artists Anna Virnich, her partner, sculptor David Prytz, and her father Winfried Virnich, the German painter. On view from April 24 – July 5, 2024, ‘A Family Affair’ will debut new pieces teasing out abstract meditations by each artist, exploring novel intimate scales and materials. Connecting the artists’ work beyond their personal ties, the exhibition is a take on the possibility and poetics of lightness in every form and shape.
Conceptualized by curator Anna Rosa Thomae, the exhibition will amass, for the first time, artworks of diverse corporeality exploring common threads of continual transformation and the three-dimensional, as a result of elusive interplays between materiality and composition.
The cornerstone of Anna Virnich’s practice is fabric, the emotive evocation of this tactile material into a painterly form. Recognizing the extreme personal connections humans have with textiles, Virnich charges her pieces sensually and haptically, instantly connecting the viewer to the paintings, which ultimately become familiar artifacts creating a distinctive world of genuineness. Virnich processes materials such as cloth, wax, and plants with specially developed scent compositions, and probes answers to her inner world of truth. In their abstract ephemerality, these creations forge a presence that transcends boundaries, conveying a poetic essence of the material itself and its ability to create new spaces and complexity in the painterly field. Lending a sense of vitality, Virnich uses fabrics as carriers of subjective expression through fragility and extensibility. The paintings seem to float, becoming a composite entity implying variations of depth, and at the same time echoing and celebrating qualities of lightness.
With a profound interest in philosophy and music, David Prytz infuses the elements of these disciplines in creating sculptures interconnected in otherworldly structures, referring to the universe and space. In exploring this approach, he delves into the intricacies of time and the cosmos, challenging the relative nature of the idea of the center. By considering each element as an epicenter unto itself, Prytz’s sculptures explore eternity, boundless space, and the unique principles and emotions that govern individual experiences. His sculptures show that the form is self-contained and cohesive, yet it only manifests within its external context, defined in relation to other elements defining space or time. Prytz creates and outlines distinctive environments where clusters interact with each other, reflecting a state of continual change, working within the dualities, both the consistency and shapeless character, fragility, and roughness of materials. The structures appear weightless and brittle, a bold contrast to their materiality which conveys rawness and incompleteness, giving the pieces a poetic distinction.
Winfried Virnich is known for his exploration of abstraction in the painterly field, inquisitive with colors and their inherent abilities to produce individual and meticulous effects on the viewer. The world of the abstract, without reference to images or symbolic functions, becomes the open field for Virnich who uses texture and minimal, pure qualities of color to create plausible paintings, beyond any didactics. The placements of shades and shapes, all dependent on each other, conceal individual metaphors bringing forth a clarity of the painterly truth. The specific rhythm of the brushwork in coincidence with pigment creates a certain poetic quality in Virnich’s paintings, suggesting context without clearly defining it. This musical quality which is a product of fine balance between the primary painterly elements, brings forth a certain chromatic quality, an interplay of lightness and depth at once.
‘I am thrilled to present 'A Familiar Affair’ as the artists will show together for the first time presenting all new works specifically for us. The exhibition unveils intricate connections in their artistic production — a sense of lightness in all pieces albeit different mediums makes for an unexpected discourse between the works,’ explains curator, Anna Rosa Thomae.
