FRANKFURT.- Trisha Donnelly’s works oscillate between the concrete and the abstract, in accordance with their materiality and against it, within the nature of the medium and contrary to it.

Materiality, form, and medium lose their supposed destination. Upon longer and more precise examination, the real of the work is grasped. The works are simply what they are and not solely in the realm of the visual.

The Museum Fur Moderne Kunst is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to Trisha Donnelly, featuring new photographic works as well as drawings, sculptures, and videos from her earlier phases.

The Unnameability of Things

Cord Riechelmann

In the modern era, there has been an awareness that someone can live in two epochs or experience two states simultaneously ever since Marcel Proust showed how it’s done in his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. But what drives contemporary art just as reductionism and subtraction once propelled science toward quantum theories exploring what it means to think many things at the same time and knowing that it will never be possible to depict them all without loss in a linear form, with a beginning, middle, and end. And it really becomes a problem for many scholars of simultaneity when someone holds two antithetical ideas in their head at the same time, yet continues to function perfectly well. How on earth can you define the shape of something like that?

Every object, even the most mundane ones, can reveal its sublime dimension, just as the abyss of emptiness of the name given to it can cause one to freeze. You can ask yourself why you don’t really know or can’t say what makes one thing so strange or so appealing or so different from another. Is it due to an inadequate vocabulary or insufficiently developed methods for visualizing that singular difference?

Modernism in art also started out with a call to paint whatever we don’t see rather than what we do. It then swiftly dove into media like photography and film, which supposedly make visible the things that the naked eye cannot discern. And that has led to so many wonderful, and less wonderful, works and stories, but it has also helped to establish the media’s limitations. You might say that Trisha Donnelly’s works, having been liberated from the illusions of early modernism, are searching for that which is unnameable and undecidable about these things, objects, and materials. The work should not be interpreted as a protest against the mathematicized formalizations of science, which do indeed manage to create a consistent structure for reality, just as poetry succeeds in leading words to the edge of the unsayable without claiming to be able to utter them.

The artworks address simple phenomena that characterize materials and media, whether photography or pencils, as much as the resulting piece itself. For that reason, too, it is quite difficult to locate her works at their point of origin:

within the semiotic process in contemporary art concerning unnameable and undecidable qualities in things, articles, and situations, as well as the attempt to represent indifference in the process of representation itself.