Starting from the 23rd March, you can find us at the Milan Image Art Fair. Artcos booth will feature works by Johanna-Maria Fritz and Gideon Mendel, recognized as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographers and awarded for his longterm advocacy project Drowning World. As a third artistic position, Arne Grugel’s carefully assorted multi exposure photography creates a link to Milan’s heritage in art and design.
Gideon Mendel
Since 2007, Mendel has been working on Drowning World, his long-term art and advocacy project about flooding that is a personal response to climate change. Solo shows of Drowning World have been shown at many galleries and public installations around the word, including ‘Les Recontres de la Photographie’ in Arles.
In 2021, the photographer and climate activist Gideon Mendel has been affected by climate change himself. Stored inside the ARTCO warehouse in Western Germany, his works were severely affected by a devastating flooding. These unique pieces have thus become an artistic evidence of urgent planetary catastrophes.
Johanna-Maria Fritz
During her visual research on female carpet weavers in Afghanistan, Fritz has had portraits of Taliban men woven into rugs. Made by the same girls whom the Islamists had forbidden to learn, thus to hope. Iconic artworks that illustrate the inhumanity of the current regime. In the fair, these recent works from Afghanistan are juxtaposed with her long-term art project LIKE A BIRD – a documentary of circus performers in Muslim–majority countries. Motifs that resemble dreamy landscapes full of contrasts, intimate despite their sometimes precarious situations.
Arne Grugel
Grugel’s art is an interplay between shape, color and arrangement. Shot all analogue in multiple carefully assorted exposures, the figures he is creating leave a unique impression of planet-like bodies. Suspended in space, they slowly pulsate and radiate as they float along quietly.
Their energy is released through light and color – pulling in the observer’s focus while darker elements seem to be dense and impenetrable. Just like our universe, these bodies are an invitation to find equipoise between energy and gravity.
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