FMP portfolio review Nina Venus

HildeMaassen
Oct 3, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Oct 6, 2020

I have a portfolio with Nina Venus. Time to do a bit research.

On her website the first thing I read is: Nina Venus is an Artist and a curator.

She has a projects with cloud paintings. The work evolved from series on color gradients. (1998) She investigates the relevance of painting as a medium of exploration and expansion thereof. A 6x20 ft triptych is one peace of the series: entitled “On the Site of the Rationalization of Painting around the Laws of Color Theory” = quote theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss.

The paining at the right site is one of this series and I don't think it is a mazing that a new serie of cloud painings was born from this gradient studies.

This body of work evolved taking the color field paintings to a narrative realm. The elusive quality and fleeting, transitory nature of clouds has ever since made the sky a projection field for all sorts of phenomena of the incomprehensible.

I think is special that I researched gradients before about a year ago. Created the other way around; generated out of the image using a the Adobe capture app.

Text copied from Nina's site:

"Tapping mostly into literary works from 18th and 19th century describing clouds as rebuses or silent scriptures of the sky, as well as using systematic scientific compendiums that were created in the late 19th and early 20th century and incorporated photography primarily as a recording and documenting method, this body of work aspires to create a painterly, visual text reflecting timeless human yearning".

The review

I had too much to show and not enough time but what was very interesting. She loved the work and would buy one of the vases from me.

She told me that my project combines so much that I have to be aware of the fact that it can be too much. I had to take care not to be misunderstood: that I am an artist not a scientist. She advised me to choose from the heart for what I handed in for the FMP WIP. I captivated her in the story at the moment I told her about the fact that I tried to capture the to be in-between "zwischen sein" in German. This was the only moment that she went back to her native language, a telling sign. (ut inter in Latin).

I told her about the morph part where I tried to make the transition from one cloud to the other and got the kind of disintegration from one state to the other with a very graphic result.

She was enthusiastic talking about the clouds being poetic, mysterious, the telling face of the sky; to go back to the mythical reading. What I found back on her site and copied above already.

Art has the task to make people look at the world in another way is what she told me and I did so with this series.

Having 2 minutes left I accidentally hid the stop button. I left her with my mailadress and the link to my presentation. Curious if she will mail to me.

She told me to have a look at the work of Olafur Eliasson. The way he manages to be seen as an artist not as a scientist.

In the afternoon I received a mail from Nina:

Hi Hilde,

Thank you for sharing your work with me during the portfolio review this morning.

Thank you also for sending me the link for your cloud-project, which I am naturally particularly interested in! Clouds! Beautiful, fleeting elements, clouds!

I believe you have a load of potential material for your Master’s thesis - and well beyond.

Keep it up and focus on the art part of the work.

Relating to your work and in terms of working with “the inbetweeness of things”, I mentioned Olafur Eliasson.

Thomas Demand and his artistic practice could be interesting for you, too.

And do look at Gerhard Richter’s cloud paintings :-)

Wishing you all the best,

Nina

.........................

Gerhard Richter. 1976. Wolke (cloud) Oil painting

Gerhard Richter 1969 Oil and graphite on canvas

Gerhard Richter 1968 Clouds and cloudy

From Rembrandt to Richter

Sotheby’s had a sale with the title from Rembrandt to Richter.

The monumental 4 panels oil paint of Richter is for sale. The painting, gives a viewer the impression of being “on the top floor of a skyscraper, looking through the clouds”. - Emma Baker, Sotheby’s head of sale. 10,449,000GBP was paid.

Thomas Demand

The work moves between fiction and reality. He makes life-size models from colored paper and cardboard that he captures with the help of photography. By destroying the paper constructions when the photo is taken, their sole reason for existence becomes the final photo image.

“My pictures give you an image of your future memory”: Thomas Demand

The work is made quite architecturally I think you should be in it, but that is not possible because the photos are quite chaotic above and below with a lot of details in which you can lose yourself. But the idea that it is all made from paper and cardboard makes it amazing.

“It’s not about drama, a splatter of blood on the floor, or something like that. But a simple arrangement of objects” Thomas Demand

What speak to me is the building an own reality and world

Olafur Eliasson

I saw a lot of these kind of "small cloud series" from different years.

Olafur Elasson - 2001- Small Cloud series

I wrote about the installation for "The Weather Project", 2003, saw before. The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern was filled with the light from an artificial Sun. A big installation where people are bathed in light.