KREFELD.- The Kunstmuseen Krefeld are presenting the first solo museum exhibition of the New York-based artist Anna K.E. (b. 1986 Tbilisi, Georgia). The artist works in a variety of media and genres, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, language, and film. She combines architecture, design, and art effortlessly and with relish. Through precise staging, Anna K.E. shifts the viewer’s perception of Haus Esters, built between 1927 and 1930 by the internationally renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For the exhibition For Our Parents, she intersperses the rooms with a system of references, linguistic allusions, and fragile architectural components. Approximately twenty works from the past two years are on view, including a new series of enamel pieces and a wall drawing. Inspired by the special character of the houses, the artist has also made a new film and developed a site-specific outdoor installation.
“With the title of the exhibition, For Our Parents,” explains Katia Baudin, Director of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, “Anna K.E. shows us how important the connection between past and future, tradition and renewal is to her. The artist’s work is therefore ideally suited to Haus Esters by Mies van der Rohe. In this special space, our goal is to constantly explore and reexamine early twentieth century modernism from a contemporary perspective.”
Anna K.E. interprets Haus Esters as a place where conventional notions of space and time are playfully suspended. Colorful arrows on the floor signal: This is the way. Their auspicious coloring is the result of various plant seeds and cat litter. Narrow sections of wall, usually neglected in exhibitions, are marked with enamel arrows. The system of clues and references allows for an unusual, sometimes bizarre perception of the spaces. The experiment of spatial displacement and alienation continues in an architectural landscape that runs like a narrow band through several rooms. This utopian city model is ultimately a test of materials. Countless magnets and various metal elements form a fragile construction held together only by the invisible magnetic field. Placed on thin metal legs, this pseudo-architecture appears to float and at the same time forms a massive barrier that regulates the passage through the rooms.
“In one of the wall drawings, the artist addresses the state of being located in drift, that is, in motion,” says Sylvia Martin, curator of the exhibition, ‘for me, this ‘located in drift’ describes the exhibition and the state we viewers assume in a very precise and poetic way.”
In her new filmic work, which Anna K.E. shot at Haus Esters, the artist moves through the empty rooms, crouching along the walls. She embodies an unknown creature. Humanity has been displaced from the center of the world. On the south side of the house, one is confronted with a metal railing that only reaches mid-thigh. This railing thus offers no safety. It has been brought down from the terrace on the upper floor of the house to the garden floor in a kind of “copy and paste” method. In a complete reversal of spatial relationships, the physical action that the artist captured on film in Haus Esters can be seen in miniature in the open pipe at one end of the railing. This small detail reveals much that is essential to Anna K.E.’s art: from the choreographed body to unstable, unsettling conditions and an almost explosive joy of experimentation.
Curator of the exhibition: Dr. Sylvia Martin
Anna K.E. was born in 1986 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her parents are two of the most famous Georgian artists, Keti Kapanadze and Gia Edzgveradze. After studying classical ballet at the Vakhtang Chabukiani School in Tbilisi, she moved to Germany in 2000. From 2002 to 2004, she studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart with Alexander Roob and then at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in until 2010, where she was a master student of Georg Herold and Christopher Williams. Anna K.E. has been living and working in New York since 2010.
In 2019, Anna K.E. represented Georgia at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work was last shown in 2024 in the solo exhibition Dolorem Ipsum at the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover.
