Material Tales: Gestures of Abstraction: Taqwa Ali, Kim Bartelt, Tonia Calderon, Elke Foltz, Naomi Lisiki, Senzeni Marasela, and Georgina Maxim

Bode is pleased to announce the opening of the extensive group exhibition Material Tales: Gestures of Abstraction. The exhibition tells tales of abstraction by allowing material, form, and gesture to speak. Bringing together works by Taqwa Ali, Kim Bartelt, Tonia Calderon, Elke Foltz, Naomi Lisiki, Senzeni Marasela, and Georgina Maxim, it assembles different stories and perspectives on abstract visual languages.

 

Abstract art, which emerged in the 1940s primarily in the USA and France from the search for a visual language that emphasizes the artistic act in itself, is now a firmly established part of artistic expression. Figurative depictions and painterly principles gave way to open image processes and immediate, individual expression. Without hierarchies of forms and approaches, the self‑experience of viewers became an integral part of the work.

 

Material Tales: Gestures of Abstraction presents an exclusively female constellation of such abstract positions of contemporary artists. At its core lies a material‑oriented exploration of abstract visual language. The works on view address themes of everyday experience and perception, as well as engagements with the transience of time and matter and with individual and collective spaces of memory relating to origin and belonging.

 

Carried by deep red tones, Naomi Lisiki’s works oscillate between entire image worlds and fragmentary, almost ornamental structures. The larger of the two works shown, Land of the Sun, exerts a particular pull: one is drawn closer, trying to recognize whether it conceals a dense primeval forest, a mystical fantasy landscape, or rather the artist’s own inner emotional world. Short, dynamically placed brushstrokes suggest flora and tree forms, but, as is typical of abstraction, they could just as easily exist completely detached from any real model.

 

Organic‑floral forms also stretch across the canvases of Elke Foltz, literally reaching out in length. Almost as if in a state of transformation, in continuous motion, this sense of process is also reflected in Foltz’s treatment of the canvas itself: at times it serves as a fully colored background, at others it remains largely unpainted and yet still forms an integral part of the image. Her ongoing probing of the properties of her materials, techniques, and tools ultimately manifests in delicate accents that she collages from paper or canvas onto her works.

 

With Georgina Maxim’s works, the exhibition opens out beyond painting on canvas into new material realms. Positioned among the abstract‑organic paintings inspired by natural forms, Maxim’s textile works draw attention away from the external experiential space and closer to the individual, weaving materiality together with biographical experience. The two further‑worked garments evoke memories of Dadaist conceptual art and ready‑mades. Their original function is abstracted, and what was once everyday clothing becomes, through seam, cut, and embroidery, a carrier of personal as well as collective narratives.

 

Taqwa Ali’s large‑format triptych expands the broad frame of reference of abstraction not only within the gallery space but also in its engagement with material. On wooden panels, colors and forms dissolve into organic spheres and layers; defined form and figure give way to intuitively pulsating fields that seem to spread across the expansive surface in a dancing stealth. The movements on the picture surface appear as natural as the technical components with which the artist works: emulsions of earth, hibiscus blossoms, and hide glue are applied to the wood panels and then sealed with archival protective spray.

 

As if the wisps of fog from Ali’s painting had drifted out into the exhibition space, Tonia Calderon’s works give the impression that they have shattered on their very surface. The compositions of the two works shown in the exhibition live from color gradients, from the contrast between light and dark and between flat and relief‑like. Here, too, the picture surface itself becomes a field of abstraction: instead of a smooth application of paint, there is something unpredictable and unforeseeable clinging to these works. An interplay of conscious and unconscious, intended and unintended, makes their process‑based emergence visible.

 

Another kind of tactility defines Kim Bartelt’s works. Geometric shapes made from fragile tissue papers open up architectural pictorial spaces on the canvas. The layering of semi‑transparent papers continues a visual language whose linear stability stands in contrast to the fragility and transience of the moment Bartelt seeks to hold on to. The narrow, vertical format Zwischen Tür und Angel, for example, captures  -both in its door‑like shape and in its allusive title- a moment of uncertainty that the artist experienced when she happened to begin working on this, for her, unusual format.

 

At the end of the exhibition, abstraction returns once more to the textile. On a surface of roughly two by one meters, countless red wool threads spill from a piece of checked fabric. They form an oval body that juts into the space, imbued with something almost performative, alive. This performativity is an essential component of Senzeni Marasela’s multimedia practice, in which she weaves performance, photography, video, print, textile, and knitting together and translates themes of social inequality and processes of urbanization into material form. The ever‑present color red functions as a marker of remembrance of the time of the so‑called “Red Dust,” a South African drought period in the early 1930s.

 

Together, the works presented in Material Tales: Gestures of Abstraction underscore the diversity of abstract visual languages. Abstraction becomes a medium in which materiality, gesture, memory, and individual as well as collective experience are interwoven. Whether in paint, paper, fabric, or emulsions, each work opens up its own space of perception, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in movement, process, and intuition. In this way, abstraction becomes not only visible but also tangible—as a dynamic, sensuous, and profoundly human means of expression in contemporary art.