Marthe Ramm Fortun
Realization Following a Project by the Artist

 

 

30 April 15

 

Marthe Ramm Fortun, Realization Following a Project by the Artist, 2015
Marthe Ramm Fortun, Realization Following a Project by the Artist, 2015

 

Accompanying program: Couting in Eight, Moving by Color

*For the work called Slices, I reduced eight entities in time horizontally to eight inches, and four levels in space vertically to one inch each but added four more levels. I completed the first drawing and then visualized it as if it was the front slice in a loaf of bread.* (Channa Horwitz' Artist Statement, www.gf.org)

Like vibrant colors on a grid, Marthe Ramm Fortun employs the arbitrary somatic and affective dimensions of being together with the audience inside the artistic parameters of the exhibition Counting in Eight, Moving by Color, the first comprehensive presentation of Channa Horwitz' work, currently on view at KW. The performance picks up rudimentary artifacts and everyday actions such as slicing bread, used by Horwitz in her own writing to conceptualize complex ideas.

With an ephemeral installation making variations over Horwitz' concepts, Fortun will employ the KW basement to launch the audience into a circular movement through the exhibition space. In the humorous work Mr. and Mrs. McGuilicutty (1964), Horwitz introduced black and grey monochromes in the basement of the depiction of a bourgeois household. The triptych is easy to dismiss with its whimsical use of floral fabric, but abstraction is poignantly introduced as the foundation of the household in this representational work. Fortun picks up the flower motif and introduces it in the basement, taking note of abstraction and representation as adjacent spaces.

The performance Realization Following a Project by the Artist (2015) inserts a discarded title back into circulation, previously belonging to a wall montage executed by KW installation team following a set of Horwitz' sketches. The title has gone through a cycle of versions and is now determined as "Retrospective realization following the project Suite 8 (2015)". By appropriating the discarded title, Fortun invites the audience to contemplate the responsibility of interpreting, preserving and coining the oeuvre of an artist that left behind generous and open-ended instructions for other artists to engage, as well as rigorous and specific concepts that are not yet fully cemented in the art historical canon.

At the core of Channa Horwitz' work, shared in the artistic practice of Marthe Ramm Fortun, is the incessant question of What If, a constant, curious probing that defies easy categorization. Strategies could include finding one's place by loosing it, following the cues on graph paper from a so-called Valley Housewife throwing persistent shapes ahead of - or precisely within her time. WHAT IF we could be together in the continuum of Horwitz' works?

Realization Following a Project by the Artist is funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy, Berlin.