Tidings

DEUTSCH

Tidings
Anna Gestering

November 16 – December 16, 2023

Opening⎢Thurs. November 16, 18 - 21 hr

Tues. + Wed. 11 - 15 hr / Thurs. + Fri. 11 - 18 hr / Sat. 11 - 16 hr

einBuch.haus / Florastr. 61, 13187 Berlin 

The exhibition Tidings brings together a vibrant collage-based body of work which Anna Gestering has generated over a period of 10 years.

Encountering the collage series “Papers”, one is captivated by the clear-cut shapes of irregular geometries and surfaces made up of straight lines, edges and curves, and ranging from pale to vivid colours gathered together in pairs or larger constellations seemingly floating on different formats of blank paper. For generating these shapes, Gestering draws directly "with scissors in colour", whereby, unlike the painter Henri Matisse quoted here, she uses a prefabricated colour palette taken from an everyday medium: regularly published daily and weekly newspapers.

By meticulously selecting, collecting and reorganizing these paper fragments in new configurations on blank newspaper, she introduces a twofold reading of the news: one looking for factual information and one playfully seeking for abstract aesthetic properties. Through this filtering process, the merely informative function of the medium is subverted, enabling a new poetic approach.

Indeed, Gestering’s works highlights the importance of attuning to the highs and lows of a seemingly chaotic world by slowing down and paying close attention to both our inner and outer realities. It also reminds us that imaginative power is an inexhaustible resource for creating and preserving room(s) for manoeuvre.

The selected artists’ book Tidings (2023) for the exhibition at einBuch.haus emerges from this series of newspaper-collages. It explores the concept of information flood, an exposure to or provision of too much information or data.

Another word for information and news, “tidings” also refers to the daily newspaper in older English language usage. Etymologically the term equally contains the word “tide”, the alternating advance and retreat of seawater along a coastline.

Unfolding Tidings, the Leoporello opens up an expandable space of multiplying potentialities. Like the changing patterns of the tides, waves made up of tender curves in colours varying from deep blue to pale azure hues rise and fall on the white paper pages. Alternating in shape and intensity, in variations and repetitions, the waves set a visual rhythm noticeable in both vertical and horizontal coordinates, evoking both the structures of a music score and a tide chart.

What seems to soften the constant "flood" with which one is confronted in "Tidings" is the continuous rhythmic pattern, which, albeit irregular, offers the viewer some calming pauses, and which challenges one to create order through comparison and retrospection, through the search for connections and distancing.

(Excerpt from the text Tidying the tide by Eleni Mouzourou)

Anna Gestering

Anna Gestering (*1982, DE) is a visual artist. Her artistic work focuses on painting and collage. She studied fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (2003-2009), at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Dijon (2005/2006) and at the Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst, Leipzig (2008), graduating with a diploma in 2009.

einBuch #30 

TIDINGS
Anna Gestering

210 × 297 mm, 11 pp.
Leporello, (openform: 252 cm)

Interior: Indigo print on Metapaper Extrarough warmwhite 270 g/qm
Cover: UV-Direct printing on bookbinding cardboard 2mm

Concept & Design: Anna Gestering
Digital print: AusDruck GbR Berlin

Edition of 10
Signed and numbered 

PRESS RELEASE