QUEENS, NY.- The Queens Museum is presenting Anna K.E: Profound Approach and Easy Outcome, the artist’s first museum exhibition in the US. The exhibition features a dramatic remix of works from the artist’s series of the same name (2006-ongoing), where the artist photographs herself in front of renowned figurative paintings while posing in mimicry of their subjects.
K.E.’s work appears on the Queens Museum’s monumental 3,700 square feet Large Wall, one of the largest art spaces in New York City. Measuring 140 feet wide by 45 feet high, this architectural highlight forms a magnificent diagonal and is highly visible from outside in Flushing Meadows Corona Park through floor-to-ceiling windows, visually drawing parkgoers inside and impacting their experience once they arrive.
The series started in 2006 in New York on a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art when K.E. encountered fellow visitors having their photos taken in front of artworks. In this simple action—which narrowly predated the now excessively common “selfie-taking” practice in museums—the artist found a remarkable fluency between past (iconic history) and present (real-life human experience) coming together into the future.
“It felt like a complex phenomenon, tragic but relieving and Dadaistic. It gave me a chance as a young female artist—born in Eastern Europe but who grew up and ‘became an artist’ in Western Europe—to reflect on the canonical Western art history and navigate myself among all those masterpieces and attempts, in order to create new interpretations and meanings—within a very “easy” gesture,” says K.E. explaining the motivation behind her photographs.
Billboard-size photographic works affixed to the Wall depict the artist in action in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, posing as the depicted characters in renowned master portraits by Otto Dix and Balthus. Profound Approach and Easy Outcome performs a reflection on artistic production, feminism, power, and the role of institutions, as K.E. considers her own role in art history, questioning its maledominated legacy. It all refers back to the practice of art as an endeavor of imagination and intellect which does not, however, exclude the artist’s physical exertion. To this end, at the foot of the soaring wall, K.E. has placed a group of small wooden sculptures, each with videos playing on small monitors. In a stark contrast with the sheer monumentality of the artist’s appearance on the wall, the miniscule screens display the artist in variously absurd, physical activities inside the confine of her studio.
Profound Approach and Easy Outcome is the fourth iteration in a series of site-specific commissions by women artists on the Large Wall. Previous artists featured include Mickalene Thomas, Mariam Ghani, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Anna K.E. (b. 1986, Tbilisi, Georgia) studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at the following venues: Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv; Simone Subal Gallery, New York City; Barbara Thumm Gallery, Berlin; Mannheimer Kunstverein; Figge von Rosen Gallery, Cologne; Kunstverein Leverkusen; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and most recently Primary, Nottingham, and (with Florian Meisenberg) Signal, Brooklyn. She has participated in recent group shows at: Gagosian Gallery, Athens; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; The Kitchen, New York City; Moscow International Bienniale for Young Art; Württembergischer Kunstverein; and The High Line, New York City. K.E. currently lives and works in Queens, New York City.
