Louisa Clement – Language of realities

Curated by Sue Irion and Dominique Mollet

Under the title Language of Realities, Kunst Raum Riehen is showing the most extensive exhibition by the artist Louisa Clement to date. Different series of works enter into a dense dialog across the three floors of the Kunst Raum. Using various media, they question physicality and the now fragile categories of the individual and reality.

Louisa Clement, born in 1987, studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and was a master student of Professor Andreas Gursky. She deliberately uses different media to formulate individual series, such as the Mork (2016-2018) cast in concrete, which meets the cell phone photograph of a Limb Man (2017). The video loops of the series not lost in you (2017) form a recurring element in Riehen. Two hands in ornamental nylon gloves run around the bodies of greenish, pink or yellow shimmering fiberglass mannequins. Attracted and fascinated, simultaneously repelled and ambivalently touched - this unsettling moment is characteristic of almost all of her works.

Clement's works address the human presence in the artificial as well as the artificial presence in the human. She reflects on the living conditions and themes of a western, urban present at the beginning of the 21st century, which is confronted with new forms of communication, standardization and transformation. Observations and found objects from everyday life are used. The boundary between the photographic and the painterly image is not sharply drawn, neither in aesthetic nor in technical terms, and it is permeable on both sides. The dissolution of fixed and clearly defined structures is consequently an essential aspect of her work, which has recently been shown at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, the Gladstone Gallery in New York, the Fotomuseum Braunschweig and the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf, among others.