ANE GRAFF: "My Days Are Consumed Like Smoke"
STANDARD (OSLO)
PRESS RELEASE
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ANE GRAFF
"MY DAYS ARE CONSUMED LIKE SMOKE"
02.06.-03.07.2005/ PREVIEW: THURSDAY 02.06.2005 / 19.00-21.00
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STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present Ane Graff's solo exhibition "My Days Are Consumed Like Smoke". The exhibition brings together six large-scale drawings that Graff has produced during a period of one year. Ane Graff's works involve themselves with one of the more profound issues central to drawing: the relationship between the lifelike and the lifeless.
In Ane Graff's "Untitled (Snake)", 2004 - her graduation piece from the National Art Academy in Bergen - a grand tableaux is constructed, where myriads of exotic snakes, lizards and insects are depicted against a backdrop of Nordic trees and plants. Although the individual elements are rendered in a naturalistic manner, the scene as a whole comes through as unconvincing. Not only does the fusion of animal and plants from different tropes seem unlikely, but the immense concentration of events and elements produce a systematic doubt as to whether this could represent an actual moment. As the museum diorama Graff's drawings rather make a claim for a space between the factual and the fictional. In referencing this tradition of scientific display, Graff transforms the staging of the factual into a hallucinatory rendition of the real without departing from a discipline in draftsmanship.
The six drawings in the show share an interest with the still-life tradition of the 17th century Holland, referred to as "forest floor still life". Originally a religiously motivated genre, these works depict the symbols of the Resurrection in their fight against symbols of darkness, most commonly in the shape of reptiles. In Graff's works, the forest floor still frames the events while the characters are released from their distinct symbolic values. At a closer look, one realizes that only the symbols of the dark and low have been retained. Nature is left as a mute irrationality. Graff's drawings are not merely depictions of nature but sensorial explorations of landscape. Flora and fauna are not static but innervated images that hold an irrational logic inspired by the Romantic notion of the sublime.
Ane Graff is educated at the National Art Academy in Bergen and the University of Oslo. Her works were last Fall included in the exhibitions "Standard Escape Routes" at ISCP, New York, and the annual Autumn Exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. "My Days Are Consumed Like Smoke" is her first solo show.
