Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
-
Artworks
Sarah Ortmeyer
DIABOLUS (PROTECTOR), 2019
black paint on aluminum
10 x 13 x 8 cm
unique
Copyright The Artist
With ‘DIABOLUS MONDIAL', Ortmeyer continues her interest in universal language and basal emotions. This work is part of the ‘EMOJI SHADOW’ series, sculptures of characters from the emojicon lexicon. Emojicons...
With ‘DIABOLUS MONDIAL', Ortmeyer continues her interest in universal language and basal emotions. This work is part of the ‘EMOJI SHADOW’ series, sculptures of characters from the emojicon lexicon.
Emojicons are conceived as a universal pictographic language, a vocabulary that allows for visual exchanges. Created by some of the world’s biggest commercial entities, they break down linguistic borders. Just like chess boards, emojicons are visually and symbolically familiar in contemporary society. The language of chess is also one of moves and gestures within a structured order, with billions of possible outcomes. But where chess is all about strategy and knowing the rules of the game, emojicons enable the communication of feelings without guidelines. They allow for the expression of matters that are often hard to put into words, or that do not even exist in textual language.
The ‘DIABOLUS’ devils are cast in aluminium on a giant scale. The sculpture’s roughly polished silver surface, without eyes or a smile, is no longer a useful anthropomorphic logo figure, but rather a constructed malleable mass of otherworldly force. Ortmeyer tempers the dualities rooted in the collective imagination. In doing so, she scrambles cultural references and brings feelings into the rational, exploring the human psyche with the most immediate language and applying an ‘SMS vernacular’ to the artistic field.
In 79 AD, before being engulfed in the eruption of a volcano, the ancient Roman author Pliny recounted in his Naturalis Historia that the shadow invented painting. It was first discovered by a Corinthian girl who drew her lover’s shadow on the wall, by the light of a lamp, as a way to preserve his image before going into battle.
Not all shadows are acts of love.
Though by nature the shadow is sensual—it traces the outline of forms that impart a silhouette onto a surface when a light source is interrupted.
Light does not vanish to create the shadow; its brightness exists upon another plane (between the source of the projection and a screen).
Shadows are acts of touch where identity and sex become irrelevant.
In the EMOJI SHADOW SERIES, the silhouettes of signifiers—hearts (COR), spiders (ARANEA), rainbows (ARCUS), devils (DIABOLUS), and palm trees (PALMA) among them—are painted in a single tone of black pigment on paper and metal in hues of either silver, eggshell, or charcoal.
The familiarity of the Emojicon codex is transformed into a vehicle for idiosyncratic language: reductive yet anthropomorphic fragments of image-based conversation.
Tropical trees either burst like a firework, or droop like broken fronds after a storm.
The apparition of eight-legged creatures appear weighted and swollen, or otherwise buoyantly dance in a gust of wind upon a web.
Hearts and devils swarm—love and death in equal measure.
The EMOJI SHADOW SERIES returns to the desire that exists at the heart of the origin of painting: for love, an oasis, a paradise.
The exhibition incorporates the formal elements of chess alongside a
series of new paintings and sculptures. In this show, the personification
of heaven and hell is also explored through the artist’s ‘emoji shadow
series,’ a body of work that interrogates the relationship to the origins
of painting, universal language, and iconography. In her paintings
of palm trees, devils, and rainbows, Ortmeyer captures the essence
of the codex as both a type of script and a physical object capable of
existing in nature.
Comprised of all new works in a massive arrangement, ‘FLYRT’ features classic artistic disciplines such as sculpture, painting, and film, developing non-traditional modes of presentation. HUMAN-SIZED CHESSBOARDS are interspersed throughout the three exhibition rooms. The CHESSBOARD PAINTINGS reflect the ethereal colors of the sky. These oversized panels are accompanied by a pair of MINIATURE CHESSBOARDS. The gridded pictures are the latest works in Ortmeyer’s long and continued investigation into chess, emphasizing the aesthetics and dynamics of this iconic sport. Throughout the building and protruding from the walls are chess pieces made of OSTRICH EGGS. Through nature these large female products have developed unique distorted surfaces. Premiering in Kunstverein München’s Kino, the silent movie FLYRT POETICA is the result of Ortmeyer’s long lasting correspondence with a rising teen idol and rapper, during which the pair developed a peculiar collective vocabulary punctuated by the consistent, repeated appearances of sophisticated POEMS, BLACK EMOJIS, DICK PICS, LUXURY ITEMS, NUDES, SPIDERS, FILM STILLS, IDEOGRAMS, LYRICS, SYMPHONIC SCORES, HOLLYWOOD, HEARTS, MUSES and ARTWORKS by artists such as ROSEMARIE TROCKEL, LOUISE
BOURGEOIS, ALMA THOMAS, and ORTMEYER herself. Demonstrating the rapid visually-focused nature of 21st century exchange, Ortmeyer articulates a return to HIEROGLYPHICS, where pictures have become a more immediate and nuanced form of language. This correspondence was collected as a HARDCOVER BOOK and
printed black on silver, a mutual material choice by the rapper and the artist. The book was then transposed into a moving image, to be projected onto the SILVER SCREEN. This procession of HIEROGLYPHS also forms the basis of a new series of painted works on silver paper. Featuring rapid hand-rendered icons of BLACK SPIDERS and BLACK HEARTS, these coded paintings chart a correspondence throughout the exhibition spaces. ‘FLYRT’ combines a system of relentlessly repeated variables varying in size and material, while keeping the core of
being emotionally completely raw.
Emojicons are conceived as a universal pictographic language, a vocabulary that allows for visual exchanges. Created by some of the world’s biggest commercial entities, they break down linguistic borders. Just like chess boards, emojicons are visually and symbolically familiar in contemporary society. The language of chess is also one of moves and gestures within a structured order, with billions of possible outcomes. But where chess is all about strategy and knowing the rules of the game, emojicons enable the communication of feelings without guidelines. They allow for the expression of matters that are often hard to put into words, or that do not even exist in textual language.
The ‘DIABOLUS’ devils are cast in aluminium on a giant scale. The sculpture’s roughly polished silver surface, without eyes or a smile, is no longer a useful anthropomorphic logo figure, but rather a constructed malleable mass of otherworldly force. Ortmeyer tempers the dualities rooted in the collective imagination. In doing so, she scrambles cultural references and brings feelings into the rational, exploring the human psyche with the most immediate language and applying an ‘SMS vernacular’ to the artistic field.
In 79 AD, before being engulfed in the eruption of a volcano, the ancient Roman author Pliny recounted in his Naturalis Historia that the shadow invented painting. It was first discovered by a Corinthian girl who drew her lover’s shadow on the wall, by the light of a lamp, as a way to preserve his image before going into battle.
Not all shadows are acts of love.
Though by nature the shadow is sensual—it traces the outline of forms that impart a silhouette onto a surface when a light source is interrupted.
Light does not vanish to create the shadow; its brightness exists upon another plane (between the source of the projection and a screen).
Shadows are acts of touch where identity and sex become irrelevant.
In the EMOJI SHADOW SERIES, the silhouettes of signifiers—hearts (COR), spiders (ARANEA), rainbows (ARCUS), devils (DIABOLUS), and palm trees (PALMA) among them—are painted in a single tone of black pigment on paper and metal in hues of either silver, eggshell, or charcoal.
The familiarity of the Emojicon codex is transformed into a vehicle for idiosyncratic language: reductive yet anthropomorphic fragments of image-based conversation.
Tropical trees either burst like a firework, or droop like broken fronds after a storm.
The apparition of eight-legged creatures appear weighted and swollen, or otherwise buoyantly dance in a gust of wind upon a web.
Hearts and devils swarm—love and death in equal measure.
The EMOJI SHADOW SERIES returns to the desire that exists at the heart of the origin of painting: for love, an oasis, a paradise.
The exhibition incorporates the formal elements of chess alongside a
series of new paintings and sculptures. In this show, the personification
of heaven and hell is also explored through the artist’s ‘emoji shadow
series,’ a body of work that interrogates the relationship to the origins
of painting, universal language, and iconography. In her paintings
of palm trees, devils, and rainbows, Ortmeyer captures the essence
of the codex as both a type of script and a physical object capable of
existing in nature.
Comprised of all new works in a massive arrangement, ‘FLYRT’ features classic artistic disciplines such as sculpture, painting, and film, developing non-traditional modes of presentation. HUMAN-SIZED CHESSBOARDS are interspersed throughout the three exhibition rooms. The CHESSBOARD PAINTINGS reflect the ethereal colors of the sky. These oversized panels are accompanied by a pair of MINIATURE CHESSBOARDS. The gridded pictures are the latest works in Ortmeyer’s long and continued investigation into chess, emphasizing the aesthetics and dynamics of this iconic sport. Throughout the building and protruding from the walls are chess pieces made of OSTRICH EGGS. Through nature these large female products have developed unique distorted surfaces. Premiering in Kunstverein München’s Kino, the silent movie FLYRT POETICA is the result of Ortmeyer’s long lasting correspondence with a rising teen idol and rapper, during which the pair developed a peculiar collective vocabulary punctuated by the consistent, repeated appearances of sophisticated POEMS, BLACK EMOJIS, DICK PICS, LUXURY ITEMS, NUDES, SPIDERS, FILM STILLS, IDEOGRAMS, LYRICS, SYMPHONIC SCORES, HOLLYWOOD, HEARTS, MUSES and ARTWORKS by artists such as ROSEMARIE TROCKEL, LOUISE
BOURGEOIS, ALMA THOMAS, and ORTMEYER herself. Demonstrating the rapid visually-focused nature of 21st century exchange, Ortmeyer articulates a return to HIEROGLYPHICS, where pictures have become a more immediate and nuanced form of language. This correspondence was collected as a HARDCOVER BOOK and
printed black on silver, a mutual material choice by the rapper and the artist. The book was then transposed into a moving image, to be projected onto the SILVER SCREEN. This procession of HIEROGLYPHS also forms the basis of a new series of painted works on silver paper. Featuring rapid hand-rendered icons of BLACK SPIDERS and BLACK HEARTS, these coded paintings chart a correspondence throughout the exhibition spaces. ‘FLYRT’ combines a system of relentlessly repeated variables varying in size and material, while keeping the core of
being emotionally completely raw.
Exhibitions
Emergent, 2021, Brussels (Belgium)1
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