See Line Gallery presents Maria von Köhler’s first North American solo exhibition featuring three new works.
Like the wider body of her work, the new pieces imitate artificial, degraded replicas either through the objects themselves or the positions they take within the space. As monuments, they service a homogenized heroic ideology that functions merely as a mechanism of propaganda. This forms the basis of the relationship between the works both inside and outside of the gallery.
High up on the exterior gallery wall, rippled by a breeze, hang three rigid fiberglass flags indicating some kind of event; a perpetual sale at a car dealership or a real estate open house, or perhaps even a symbol of national generic unity. It is von Köhler’s invitation to enter and witness the interplay between her other works.
Inside, one sculpture dominates in scale. Clarice is an oversized sculpture of the self-titled character from the film The Silence of the Lambs. Dressed in a flowing gown she cradles a lamb as depicted by the character Hannibal Lecter in one of his (onscreen) masterful and sensitive portraits. The original portrait as shown in the film is a drawing, but Clarice is the artist’s sculptural version of this portrait. The character in the film is widely recognizable, and in turn the work may appear to be a celebrity portrait, much in the way the flags serve as propaganda by functioning as advertising and artwork. Overseeing this relationship from its position high on a gallery wall is the work Portrait (pictured), a bemused religious militant flying monkey cast in fiberglass.
Maria von Köhler was born in Sweden and completed her MA at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2003. She was featured in Larry’s Cocktails at Gagosian Gallery in October 2005 and recently shown at Chapman Fine Arts in London.