Jorinde Voigt

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Jorinde Voigt that will be on view from May 4 through June 22. In this exhibition, the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery, Voigt will debut a brand new series of works, collectively titled Immersion. Exploring new techniques and materials, these drawings touch on notions of perception as well as the artist’s deeply personal philosophy of the self. Alongside these, the exhibition will feature a suite of highly polished cast bronze sculptures, which introduce a markedly material dimension to Voigt’s unique conceptualisation of forms and ideas.

The eight sculptures that are presented follow the artist’s longstanding interest in the visual language of mathematics and geometry. In creating these polyhedron forms – which are articulated with two distinct points – Voigt established a generative sequence in which an additional reflective surface was added to each successive object. The final work in the series breaks the cycle to become an entirely rounded shape, suggesting an infinite loop.

The sculptures function as a conceptual starting point for the works on paper displayed in the lower galleries; the imaginary environments portrayed in these drawings are the artist’s representation of the notional space inside the bronze objects. As such, the sculptures become portals via which we may experience the fictive realm of the drawings. Each Immersion drawing is annotated with a vertical line, running as an axis down the length of the sheet. Serving as compass points, these lines orient and connect the illusory sphere of the drawings to the physical points of the sculptures.

A recurrent motif in the Immersion series is the image of a torus, rendered three-dimensionally. For the artist, this form is the ideal metaphor for perception and self-understanding: inside and outside are equivalent, existing in continual dialogue. In keeping with Voigt’s introspective stance, the torus acknowledges at once our perception of ourselves and, in parallel, the ways in which we are perceived. The performative actions and complex techniques involved in making these works also mirror the artist’s multi-levelled thinking: successive layers of ink, pastel, colored pencil, and gold leaf are intricately inlaid and conspire to invoke Voigt’s invented worlds.