Y.I.A. ART FAIR #06 — Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen — Yoon Ji-Eun — Maria Lund Gallery — Fair — Slash Paris

Past: April 21 → 24, 2016

The works of the two young artists — one Korean, the other Danish — that find themselves united for this new Belgian event, reflect an acute sense of matter and colour while carrying a subtle narrative.

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen

Learning, unlearning, developing, and diverting… thus would be the vocabulary describing young Danish artist-ceramicist Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen’s path. As a good enfant terrible she acquired great technical skills which she immediately abandoned in order to invite the unknown in and push the established limits of ceramic materials and art world conventions. If the artist doesn’t impose herself any fixed agenda, her work does show a unique constant: always going further to escape all attempts to label her style, to keep her confined in a given system.

Here, a determined experimentation to conquer new territories goes hand in hand with a search where the accident is welcome. Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen explores, combines, digs, recuperates and makes fun by peaking at architecture, design, applied and fine arts or simply her past… Accumulations, still-lives, semi-functional objects, quotes; everything is used — as the hands of this boundlessly energetic and curious artist subtly make their mark. A hallmark that indicates a flawless plastic sense, where rusticity and minimalist sophistication meet trashiness, play and a sharp finesse in texture and colour juxtapositions. Pernille Pontoppidan displays unknown “beauty” and “ugliness” to cast doubt on established definitions. She makes us laugh (and we are ready to buy it!) when she suggests that Pink matter, a dense undoubtedly pink mass comes from a planet yet to be explored by science… And here comes “the agreeable sculpture” — Circular for your friends’ sake — all in roundness not to hurt! The heart’s anatomy is the subject matter of Hard inserted, where a concrete cylinder surmounted by a blue ceramic element welcomes a porcelain heart pierced by a stiff pale rose stick…. The work unsettles because at first sight it looks like a functional object put in evidence on its base. The base with all its significations such as physical elevation that gives importance is one of the two subject matters of Plints #1 and #2: Each perched respectively on a classical column and on a small tablet, two accumulations stand before our eyes… They seem ill at ease in their whiteness, like two debutantes under the great scrutiny… The artist targets the artistic institution with its systems, rules and immaculate whiteness — almost sacred — that meets and blends with the untamed, spontaneous and passionate mass of art itself. The bubbly matter contained in the two hoops of the diptych A Twelve Year Head Fracture symbolizes fairly well the state of mind of their creator! After her graduation in 2012 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Denmark in the Ceramics department in Bornholm.

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Pernille Pontoppidan (born in 1987 in Denmark, where she lives and works) has exhibited her work since then. Her collaboration with Copenhagen Ceramics allowed her to show her work in Paris, at the GALERIE MARIA LUND, in the collective exhibition Terres-Copenhagen Ceramics Invites (2013) in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, and in the exhibition space of the collective, in Frederiksberg in Denmark. The exhibition Chaotically yours (2014) hosted by the GALERIE MARIA LUND presented a dozen of her new sculptures in dialog with those of Danish artist Esben Klemann. Meanwhile, Pernille Pontoppidan was invited to participate in At first glance this division would appear to be more rational at the Galleri Format in Oslo and in the 18th International Ceramics Biennial of Châteauroux (2015). This year, she will be exhibited at the Hempel Glasmuseum (Denmark) as well as at the 24th International Ceramics Biennial of Vallauris in the context of Objects? … Objections! — a questioning of the object’s status and its perception.

Yoon Ji-Eun

In Yoon Ji-Eun’s universe reigns a striking contrast between a world on pause, with suspended time — such as the one of our dreams — and the relentless activity of human figures she sets inside. As if the activity led by people was solely a response to their own necessity failing to affect the environment. The environment itself presents similarities with our world; there are landscapes and interiors, but they are never completely separate: Thus, the volcano rendered in a painting hung on a living room’s wall opens and blends with the exterior landscape. The tangible world lays side by side with the imaginary and raises the big question of reality itself or more precisely of the reality perceived by each and every one. For years Yoon Ji-Eun has been an acute observer of children playing. Her observations are transposed in her works where these scenes meet an entirely different context. There are landscapes with complex facets, sometimes naturalistically precise, sometimes fluid and undefined like a psychedelic vision or else made with geometrical symmetry and organic elements. The great panorama cohabitates with a miniature universe, where illusions from the second and third dimension interlock and superimpose themselves… Yoon Ji-Eun practices drawing on paper and on plywood, to which she sometimes adds wooden sculptures to suggest a monumental topography. The use of anaglyptic is recurrent. Her drawing includes the paper marking (embossing) and pyrography. The palette is refined going from dark and dramatic colors to pastels and pearly surfaces to bring a luminous, poetic and strange world to life. There, human beings seem to evolve in their own dimension, in a grand everything that lies beyond their grasp. They play, reach their arms towards imaginary aerial formations, contemplate what maybe exists or follow the endless movement of the wood grain pattern in which Yoon Ji-Eun placed them…

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Born in 1982 in South Korea, Yoon Ji-Eun graduated in fine arts (Hongik University, Seoul, 2003 and ENSBA, Paris, 2005). The artist has been exhibiting regularly in Europe and in her native country for over ten years. Her work was selected for the 55th Salon de Montrouge (2009) and for the event Jeune Création in Paris (2010), as well as for the David-Weil Drawing Prize (2008). In 2012, the Maison des Arts de Créteil welcomed a personal exhibition of her work: What I do (not) find in her. The collaboration with the GALERIE MARIA LUND started in 2012 with her participation in the group exhibitions Archipelago and 12×12, followed the next year by her solo show Mirages. A selection of Yoon Ji-Eun’s works was presented at the ART ON PAPER 2013 fair in Brussels, as well as at the YIA ART FAIR, Paris in 2015 where it met a very warm reception.