Building My Library Exhibition

Christina Mitrentse
Building my Library
13th to 16th August
Private View 13th August 7-9p
Followed by ‘Be your own Art Night’ at Club Fresh 9pm-late
Featured artists: Duncan Ward, Bern Roche Farrelly , Marsha Bradfield, Exitjesus

NO:ID gallery is pleased to present ‘Building my Library’ a solo show by Greek -London based artist Christina Mitrentse.
Mitrentse investigates the esoteric qualities of myth and the cultural construction through possessing a dexterity of techniques, including handcrafted sculpture, drawing, photography installation and conceptual appropriation. Her practice oscillates between that of collector, storyteller, and archaeologist.
Shifting between these roles, the artist typically installing remade objects, imagery from books and natural materials into contemporary tableaux, ignoring traditional hierarchies of display.

Mitrentse’s first Solo show in London entitled The Secret School incorporated the extensive use of these disciplines to coerce the iconoplastic and conceptual vocabulary, in an endeavor to designate the peculiarity of this relational space of aesthetics. The artist continues to create a freedom to suggest new narratives and poetic ensembles of non normalized but temporary self- institutions such as, schools, libraries, churches and museums.

In an era of intimate relationship to objects and ownership the ‘Building my Library’ reflects linear processes of collective narratives into an open active space inspired by Walter Benjamin’s writing ‘Unpacking my library’. The installation is not the source of the staging of cultural otherness. It is the living library that harbors a number of book like creations from fringe areas. The work questions contemporary notions of ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and opens a path to sense alterity that goes beyond the staging of cultural experience. The art is living and shows itself in fragmented montage form in the oddities of a personal library.

The book plinths are made from pages of collected books removed from their covers and rebound as many being inter-related via a third element: diverse objects abstracted from the images become sculptures. Having transcended any thematic organization, the unreadable book-sculptures, have now the potential to amalgamate into an infinite number of new books, which yield a sculptural library defying conventional categorization. Yet their sculptural formulation raises various questions regarding hierarchies of institutions while the re-contextualization of objects in relation become a new alternative place. In a world that threatens individuality, the Library structure becomes the artists’ shelter, accentuating her vision of the sublime. In a parallel display within “Blackboard Drawings Series, the visual transmissions from the banal to the monumental appears to reveal the secret, unseen side of depicted specimens. Their choice and their meaningful invested relations leading the viewer into elliptic, enigmatic narratives through associations of cosmological ideas and the co-existence of aesthetics.

Mitrentse’s artworks are included in private and public collections in Europe and the United States. Selected shows include: Brussels Art Fair ’09-Apartment Gallery Athens. ‘Impromptu’ at Schwartz Gallery London ’09. Public Project Commission at Greenwich Foot Tunnel 08-09. ‘Time’ Stephen Lawrence Gallery.‘The End of the Earth’ at NDSM-werf, Amsterdam 08. Emerging Artists
Griechishe Kultustiftung Berlin 06. Curatorials: ‘Who Cares About Greek Art?’ Athens 06, ‘The Flat Pack’ Deptford London06.

NO:ID gallery 31 Commercial road London E1 1LG www.noidgallery.net, 07800 647 174
Friday to Sunday 1-6pm or by appointment, 07969184101
Christina.mitrentse@googlemail.com www.christinamitrentse.com/

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christina.mitrentse@googlemail.com