Ambiguous Gestures
2004 - Installation (Installation)
Felix Gmelin
Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive. Filmed from a fixed point, it portrays his father in an intimate performance of body painting with a woman unknown to Felix Gmelin. The discovery of this footage was obviously disturbing. On the one hand there is an erotic encounter with someone who is not Gmelin’s mother; on the other hand the performance itself is strangely unerotic and unsensual. The performance clearly references the work of Klein and the Viennese actionists but has an Arcadian element divorced from the Viennese school. Two acts of painting take place; the mutual painting of bodies and the impression of those bodies on a series of canvases. Taking that as his own starting point, working from stills Felix Gmelin then painted his own paintings with the help also of an assistant, thus paralleling the process of his father. He wanted to focus on the painting aspect of the film rather than its erotic potential and draw a comparison between painting and film, further enhanced by the display of stills that forms part of the installation. The grisâtre quality of the paintings serves to highlight the intense colour of the film. By making what in some respects are conventional paintings from this most intimate of films, and painting found images, Gmelin neutralises its erotic charge, making the film ‘innocent, beautiful and affirmative’. While the film is ‘embarrassing in every possible sense’ to the artist, its conjunction with his paintings and the stills transforms it into another manifestation of a utopian project. Gmelin cleanses his father ‘s work literally and metaphorically, washing the film and creating paintings using rubber gloves and brushes.
With a degree in painting and inspired by so-called institutional criticism, Felix Gmelin is interested in the possibilities of painting as a form of resistance and its direct relation to a form of socio-political reality. He is frequently known to rework the experiences of his youth into his art. In a critical, yet personal investigation, he subtly unravels the complicated interweaving of self-development, socialization and emancipation with which he grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s. Gmelin’s first substantial work in which reproduction served as a productive impetus was Art Vandals (1996-1998), a series of 12 paintings and one object, modeled after examples of modern and contemporary artworks, all of which had been vandalized. His interest in degenerate art also falls within the interest of vandalism. The emptying of meaning is a consistent theme in his work, as a number of Gmelin’s paintings. Felix Gmelin was born in Heidelberg in 1962 and has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, since he was nine.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Enlarged windows, glass bricks and balustrades allow light to flow through Hong Kong village home after renovation | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Architecture and design + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more When work was thin during the pandemic, an interior designer tapped her employees to overhaul her family’s three-storey villa with garden in Sai Kung, Hong Kong...
© » KADIST
Fernanda Gomes
2013For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...
© » KADIST
Proyecciones Espacio Odeón (Bogotá, Colombia) y Museo La Tertulia (Cali, Colombia) ¿Cómo enfrentamos la incertidumbre de estos tiempos? ¿Puede el juego, los sueños, o incluso las alucinaciones ayudarnos a imaginar otras posibles trayectorias? ¿Qué tipo de prácticas nos permiten relacionarnos con los territorios que habitamos? Tomando como punto de partida el potencial de lo inquietante en medio de una amenaza invisible, Sigo esperando es una serie de proyecciones en las fachadas del Espacio Odeón (Bogotá) y del Museo La Tertulia (Cali)...
© » KADIST
Marc Nagtzaam
2014Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines...
© » KADIST
Noé Martínez
2019As he investigates the forms that slavery took through different events that occurred during the sixteenth century in the Huasteca region of Mexico, Noé Martínez tells, in a non-linear narrative, the history of human trafficking in Relación de tráfico de personas 1525-1533 I (Study of Trafficking of Persons 1525–1533 I) ...
© » KADIST
Pedro Reyes
2005In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
© » KADIST
Robert Zhao Renhui
2014Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr...
© » KADIST
Jes Fan
2020The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves...
