Konrad Fischer Galerie is pleased the announce Aleana Egan’s solo show NEW PEOPLE.
In glass cases, Aleana Egan presents objets trouvés: fabric samples, elaborately prepared vintage clothing from the 1930s and 1940s, and forms made of papier-mâché, polystyrene, and gesso. Pinned onto the untreated stretched canvas, a virtually surreal interaction results between the glass case, the panel picture, painting, and drawing. The links connecting the individual elements remain vague. The artist borrowed the titles such as beam, bead, and free ideas about the sea from the texts of the British writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900–1998), who in A Life of One's Own recorded her life as introspection and created the notion of “butterfly thoughts.”
Aleana Egan describes her work and exhibition arrangements as “feeling with the eyes,” a negation of the clarity of things. She places great importance on the evident materiality of the various materials. Her sculptures, once made of cardboard, paste, and pigment, sculptures hanging as if by accident, have since 2016 also been made using untreated bronze. This material, valued in classical sculpture, is given something simple, uncertain, somehow reticently sensitive by leaving away the polish.
Aleana Egan uses these various materials like colors that rhythmically surface again in the entire exhibition. Egan here refers again to Marion Milner, whose 1950 study On Not Being Able to Paint deals with the nature of creativity and creative crises or blocks, with the all-too-familiar and torturous situation of not being able to work creatively.
Aleana Egan does not go actively and directly in search for materials, pieces of clothing, and objects that she uses: rather, as the artist explains they find her. For the canopy in “dwelling,” she uses a mesh fabric that is over one hundred years old, around the steel construction bits of cellulose fiber are strewn about. In a scrapped car, she finds an air filter that now dominates the gallery space in an oversized way; a removed motor element placed on untreated canvas is the central element in remote sense (Isuzu Trooper).
Aleana Egan (b. 1979) studied at the Glasgow School of Art. She lives and works in Dublin. After solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel (2008) and at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2009), exhibitions of her work followed at the berlin biennale and at Kunsthalle Kiel (2008), Sculpture Center New York, Landesmuseum Münster (2010), Leeds Art Gallery (2012), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013), Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2014) and at CCA Derry-Londonderry (2016).
