Andreas Exner is one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary artists and sculptors. Over the course of almost three decades he has constructed a body of work that is both readily familiar and utterly distinctive. Trafficking in the substances of the everyday – the cars, clothes, wardrobes and curtains that furnish our life – Exner literally fills these objects with new colours and components, disrupting their easy recognisability and forcing us to reassess our relationship to them from a new perspective.
Rose Nolan shares Exner’s interest in the stuff of our day-to-day existence, although hers is a more explicitly crafted aesthetic. Beginning with simple colour schemes and basic materials that typified the work of the early Constructivists, she uses quirks of context to drag this visual schema into a rigidly contemporary setting. Playfully positioning the more formal, politically active tendencies of these foundations against the irresistible, banal everyday-ness of it all, Nolan throws into question the value we attribute to labour, culture and, above all, art.
