An exhibition and catalogue release by Amanda Trygg.
„It’s pure coincidence that half of a small drawing is peeking out from behind the large, shiny black painting on the studio wall. “Treating painting as a doll” is handwritten in capital letters on a piece of cardboard, and to go with this, a ribbon with a bow is drawn horizontally across the top. This is surprising as well as a nonetheless plausible contradiction: a cute doll motto with a bit of decoration, executed in graphite grey on recycled paper. In context, initially the small sheet is a sideshow; it’s all about the painting hanging in the foreground, It’s not me, is it you? (2020),…..“Treating painting as a doll” is such a characteristic figure of speech for Trygg. It’s a phrase that sticks in your mind and links to her work. Treating a painting as a doll? It is a rather disconcerting thought at first. The cute, the sweet is not necessarily at home in the art context; at most, it may be accepted with an ironic tone. But Trygg is not concerned with irony, by any means; she explicitly opens up a kind of cuteness discourse with her world of motifs—which also includes certain projections onto femininity. The cute, the girlish, the girlie style and (kitschy) décor as a promise of beauty: she paraphrases all these in an arsenal of motifs including hair bows, gift ribbons, decorative and gift rosettes, cute animal figures and cheap plastic gadgets, and goes on to stage them in painting (or objects).“
Extract from the text Abyss of Cuteness by Jens Asthoff. English translation Lucinda Rennison.
Galerie Genscher
Marktstr. 138 / Hinterhof
Hamburg / Karolinenviertel
U2 Messehallen | U3 Feldstraße | S21 Sternschanze
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Behörde für Kultur und Medien der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg.
