The KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present its first exhibition with Spanish artist, Alicia Framis. Based in Amsterdam, Framis has garnered attention and accolades for her participatory, performative interventions into a variety of contexts. For LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS, Framis has constructed a mirrored steel sculpture that will occupy the center point of the Chapel at St. Agnes in Berlin. This durational, interactive show involves two distinct moments, both anchored to the reflective object at its core.
One involves Framis’ invitation to viewers to write down their greatest fears and troubling thoughts and deposit them into a small opening on the sculpture’s mirrored surface. Once collected, the second moment involves Framis’ act of removing the anonymous missives and transferring them to stretched sections of canvas that will then cover the chapel walls, creating an installation that takes shape over the course of the exhibition’s run.
Shaping the Environment
Alicia Framis is an artist whose work is defined by the specific contexts in which it dwells, often using participation and social praxis to highlight systemic issues within the larger world that exists beyond the exhibition environment, but which nevertheless plays an important role in shaping it. The porous boundaries between individuals and artworks are vital to Framis’ work, as is the relationship between subjects and the organizational structures that influence their thoughts and behavior.
In LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS, Framis instantiates a kind of occasion for interaction with her audience, allowing individual visitors to externalize and concretize their deepest fears and deposit them in the hopes that they will be transformed into paintings that give form to the exhibition; more than participating, visitors effectively become co-creators alongside Framis.
Personal impetus behind LEAVE HERE YOUR FEARS was, in part, the growth of anxiety and root fear nowadays. Framis does not propose that this introspective period be somehow erased. On the contrary, there is a generosity in Framis’ appeal to record in 2002 and share each individual’s own fears, giving space to those feelings while also using them as source material for further construction, inciting a mobility of thoughts and trepidations, bearing witness to their recoding, as simply something else. This is a mode of artmaking that is at once deeply personal and simultaneously profoundly social, a process of providing an occasion for those two spheres to meld in productive and restorative tension with one another.
Pioneer for over three decades
From the 1990s, Framis met many artists and curators like Jérôme Sans, with whom she shared a common interest in “relational aesthetics.” Framis has continually challenged and expanded the social dimension of art, inviting people to inhabit the special personal spaces that she constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. Like screaming, reading, writing, sleeping, meeting strangers, and demonstrating.
Framis engagements’ performative elements have taken form variously as workshops, installations, videos, and live actions. Her pioneering work in these fields over the last three decades was first motivated by the desire to reach disaffected communities in her native Spain, where isolation and loneliness prevailed along with socioeconomic stratification.
It is Framis’ wish to involve wide audiences in her work, inviting individuals into co-creating with her to bridge the seemingly unbreachable divides that stagnate in metropolitan centers. Alicia Framis has exhibited at major institutions internationally, Performa New York, US; Berlin Biennale, Germany; Yokohama Triennale, Japan; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Macba Barcelona, Spain; Migros Museum Zurich, Switzerland; Picasso Museum, Nice, France; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Royal Academy of the Arts, London, UK; GSK Contemporary, London, UK, among many others. Framis was selected to represent the Netherlands at the 50th Venice Biennale.
About Alicia Framis
Alicia Framis (*1967 in Barcelona) lives and works in Amsterdam. She received an MFA from the Rijksakademie of Fine Arts and the Institut Hautes Études in Paris, and was most recently awarded a PhD from the University Complutense of Fine Arts in Madrid in 2022. Framis works at the intersection of social practice and participation. Framis Is best known for his intimate, participatory installations around the subject of loneliness, human rights, and how we can live better together. Interactive sculptures, performances, and events about bringing people together.
Her works are included in numerous collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, NL; The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto; and the Rabo Art Collection, NL, among many others.
KÖNIG GALERIE
KÖNIG GALERIE was founded by Johann König in Berlin and is run by Lena and Johann König and Laura Attanasio. The gallery currently represents the work of around 40 international emerging and established artists, mostly belonging to a younger generation. The program’s focus is on interdisciplinary, concept- oriented and space based approaches in various media, including sculpture, video, sound, painting, printmaking, photography and performance.
In May 2015, KÖNIG GALERIE took up St. Agnes, a monumental former church built in the 1960s in the Brutalist style, where exhibitions take place in two different spaces, the former chapel and nave. In April 2021, the gallery branch KÖNIG SEOUL opened in the South Korean capital. The gallery has success fully placed works in various private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Additionally the presented artists have solo exhibitions with institutions worldwide and regularly partake in prestigious group exhibitions, such as Documenta and the biennials in Venice, Berlin, New York and others.
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