Meral Alma invites visitors to a special exhibition week with a light event from Monday, February 3 to Sunday, February 9, 2019.

Daily from 12 pm – 8 pm (light event possible starting 6pm)

Studio, Mühlengasse 5, 40213 Düsseldorf-Altstadt

Alma is showing a number of new works. The artist’s experiments with material and light evoke a number of different pictorial levels, but also bring a number of highly sculptural and monochrome works to bear.

Meral Alma has spent the past six months working on 8 x 3 m format painting on PVC applied directly to the wall, echoing a work shown in K21 last year.

This new work is integrated into a larger, overall staging in which the painting occupies the entire area of the rear wall of the room. The viewer is immersed in the picture and is made to feel that they are a part of it. The arrangement of space is roughly derived from the way so-called peep boxes created an illusion of space in the 18th century. The artist also works with various levels of light to enhance a sense of connection between viewer and painting.

There are four levels in total, though only one of them is outlined here:

Switch off the light and a barely-perceptible illumination of the work creates draws an unfathomed depth of space from the dark background. The extreme luminosity of the material brings particular color pigments to the fore, highlighting individual areas and adding a sculptural quality, while other figures – vividly colored in daylight – retreat into the blackness, all apparent materiality dissolved. The painting also ceases to be confined by the contours of the canvas; it seems to fuse with the space traditionally occupied by the viewer.

The roughly 200 square-meter space between Ratinger Straße and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf features special light sources with particular light frequencies to reveal the various pictorial levels.

 

Supplement February 10, 2020: Click here for impressions of the exhibition