Art Cologne
Elke Denda
Halle 11.2
Stand N007
16/11/23 - 19/11/23

Josey is delighted to announce its participation in the 56th edition of Art Cologne with a solo presentation by Düsseldorf artist Elke Denda.

Elke Denda lives in Düsseldorf and studied at the Kunstakademie under professor Fritz Schwegler between 1981 to 1987. Josey’s presentation at Art Cologne will include two new small works made after a 20-year hiatus.

Denda’s oeuvre, comprising abstract relief paintings, reverse glass paintings, video, and floor sculptures, offers a unique stance on a recent history of abstract painting, challenging attitudes towards decoration, ornamentation and display through schematic geometry, animal iconography and motifs often borrowed from her childhood. Abstract elements in Denda’s pictures are typically anchored in actuality – in the reverse glass paintings the imagery might be excerpted and transformed from some thing in the world, for example a ladybird.

For Denda, the works must function as pictures on their own terms while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of endlessness, as if the motifs presented are excerpts held by the frame that reach far beyond. Through this personal symbolism, never succumbing to the classic pitfalls of kitsch and décor, Denda has an extraordinary ability to handle the ornamental in contemporary art. The works conjure a certain irreducibly human emotionality in a commodity language of graphic reproduction.

Abstract elements in Denda’s pictures are typically anchored in actuality. Familiar images, selected for their personal resonance, become symbols that constitute, as she puts it, ‘an alphabet of the important elements of life’.3 Stripping back is, for Denda, a device to work towards abstraction rather than being abstraction itself. In the reverse glass paintings the imagery might be excerpted and transformed from some thing in the world, for example a ladybird. For Denda, the works must function as pictures on their own terms while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of endlessness, as if the motifs presented are just excerpts held by the frame that reach far beyond.

Josey’s presentation at Art Cologne follows a retrospective survey of works by Denda titled ‘Projection’ that took place at the gallery earlier this year.

~ Josey