About my work – Part 1

My name is Nina Annabelle Märkl and I’m an artist based in Munich.

In my series of posts I would like to introduce myself and my work and share projects I did during lockdown times and the current pandemic time in general.

How does the scenario in which we currently live, that “new normality” change our individual ways of working and thinking as artists?

How can we communicate our view on the world, how can we show our works in times of isolation of which we don’t know yet how it will change us as human beings in our social relations? This virtual residency is a perfect medium for exchange and sharing artistic worlds and ideas.

My work shifts between drawing, sculpture and installation.

I create settings in which I often combine modular objects of welded steel with drawings. Real spaces and possible spaces fall into one developing a game of permeability between the beholder, the space and the imagination.

The installations and settings invite the beholder to become part of a nonlinear narration, both as recipient and as an active counterpart, questioning the structures and presets within the own perception.

Drawing is seen as an instrument of possibility, comparable to a laboratory for different ways of perception and creation of the spaces and relations we are living in.

The impact of my work focuses on the individual structures of human beings in relation to the world and other people, on the permeability of interior and exterior spaces.

The first photo shows an installations of steel objects, called “Frames”. It is a modular system and so the objects of steel can build various spatial settings. They are combined with different drawings inviting the beholder to experience them like a walkable, reduced landscape. The beholder has to change perspective when walking through the installation. The ways in which drawings, space and objects are experienced change as if you find yourself as part of a kaleidoscope.

The next pictures show a series of drawings made of welded steel in combination with drawings on paper (ink, pencil, sometimes cutouts) called “Off Ornament”. They are derived from measurements of a church, referring in fragments to the ornaments of the windows.

As I’m working within the media of drawing with a sculptural approach, drawing and sculpture for me mainly are the same thing – they are both dealing with the complexity of real and possible spaces and with the ways in which we are connected to those different spheres as permeable beings. The difference lies in the process of perception or let’s say both media show different aspects of the topic: The reduced line of a drawing opens up a complex system of possible spaces unfolding as imaginary space between the beholder and the work.

The installation shows a material space, which seems capable at first glance but is then discovered as landscape that cannot be captured at one glance as it changes with each shift of perspective. My work is about these changes and about states that neither can be named or fixed. It is about permeability.

The works are settled between narration and abstraction, between gesture and precision, between closeness and distance: Antifragile constellations – forming neither-nor or both-and situations. The single works like objects, drawings or modules develop site-specific dialogues. They are like actors who can change their roles according to the setting they are in. The motives remind to some part of everyday life scenes. Constellations and objects thereby are transformed and translated. In their condensed way they slightly remind of their origin creating situations of what I describe as the experience of an almost-déja vu.

The images show one of these landscape-like installations of drawings and objects, it’s called “Permeable Entities”, Artothek Munich, 2016/2017.