Tatjana Gerhard, 'Schutzwall' at Mayday Basel

Description

Opening: Sunday, 25 September 2022, 2 p.m.

"For the solo exhibition titled "Schutzwall", Tatjana Gerhard has made a room-sized wall painting at Mayday and expands the characteristic ceramic tiles of the room into a ruin-like masonry, punctuated by gaps and openings. The installative setting allows for vistas, shifting perspectives and encounters; it in turn serves as an atmospheric backdrop for Gerhard's painterly works on canvas: hooded faces, deformed wreckage and body parts peel out of the pictorial grounds, often seeming bathed in theatrical light. The space becomes a protective wall, the pictures protective shields. Are they directed against a threat from outside or against their own abysses? With the fast and gestural painting style, Gerhard reveals the fabrication of the depicted structure - the trompe-l'œil effect is transparent, the illusion crumbles. Tatjana Gerhard thus addresses the ambivalence of walls between a place of refuge and the drawing of boundaries, isolation and permeability, as well as the power of painting itself."

Address:
Hafenstrasse 25
4057 Basel

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