Rock the Swing

Under the title “ROCK THE SWING,” the HOLLEREI Gallery presents Olga Georgieva and Larissa Leverenz in a joint exhibition. Both live and work in Vienna.

Olga Georgieva consistently explores in her work the vantage point from which the artist’s gaze falls upon the world. The starting point was and remains an insight into the separation of the observing eye from its environment. From this experience of separation and the resulting distance from the people around her, the artist developed a sense of security in this anonymous environment. This first became apparent in works created in 2008 and 2009. In delicate ink drawings of intertwined women, men, and children, Olga Georgieva explored the forms of passersby at public places around her. These records of perception pull the depicted persons from the flow of time. Through their pictorial fixation, we suddenly have seemingly endless time to scan and follow these faces, bodies, and movements. Subsequently, the artist began grouping these isolated persons with depicted cords and red barrier tapes into new contexts. Through these interventions, the images of a real world mutated into formal structures that had to obey the artist’s laws.

Larissa Leverenz understands her paintings as “spaces of possibilities,” in which an existential, tragicomic, and poetic fundamental mood often prevails. In her thoroughly composed, architectural works through 2018/19 or in her new series “Comedy of Creatures” and “All my Ghosts,” which detach from geometry, the questions remain similar. They revolve around the great themes of life, in search of our essence, our origin, and our future, and are an attempt to convey an idea about ourselves.