About the exhibition

Gentle yet intentional tapping and holding are familiar, commonly performed movements connecting the physical body with the digital flow of information. These points of contact open up the daily search for more knowledge, images to be enlarged and minimized, texts to be copied, contents to be shared and expressly appreciated. From a material viewpoint, they leave hardly a trace, no residue. Scratches, on the other hand, penetrate the surface and inscribe themselves; they perforate and injure it. Scratching is a pre-digital medium that must do damage to the material in order to assert its presence. It is also an analog means of communication whose inscription leaves shapes and signs. These may be the marks of injury and vulnerability, but within a larger semiotic framework, they convey meaning even to the point of representing writing.

The title of Melanie Ender’s first exhibition at the Gallery Krobath is a guideline, albeit a metaphorical one. The artist’s creative process follows from her contemplations of tactility, from interactions with the material through touch, gestures, and markings. She finds her building material—mostly scrap metal—in junk yards and estates, and she examines and re-encodes it in a vigorous physical interaction: through holding and heating, bending and grinding, drilling and weighing, and repositioning it. This active approach of the artist stands in contrast to the material’s seemingly passive letting itself be held, heated, bent, grounded, drilled, weighed, and repositioned.

Yet in Ender’s most recent work, her chosen material comes alive and can be seen as an active counterpart in the sense of American political scientist and philosopher Jane Bennett’s vital materialism (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, 2009). This is especially apparent in her work with rust, not to be confused with patina. Rust is the symptom of a chemical oxidation process, in which three components meet and mingle: iron, oxygen, and water. While patina forms the outer layer of its object, at times protecting it, rust penetrates deeply into the substance and forms an equivalent to the above discussed scratches. It is progressively able to corrode its metallic material beyond recognition.

Ender puts the liveliness of this inexorable corrosive process into a physical relation between objects and arrangements of symbols. She rubs the fine dust of rust from the corroded metal surfaces directly on her canvases to form abstract, intuitively placed traces. The dissolved and porous iron oxide pigments, alternating between orange-red and brown tones, reflect the depth of the abrasive layers. The partly abraded and therefore almost clean metal objects in turn are arranged by the artist into spatial installations that are caught in a fragile balance between temporary stillness and the permanence of their own weight. Or they serve the two-dimensional image carriers as prostheses-like apparatuses and articulate precisely constructed lines pointing yet again to the relevance of language and sign systems. Ender’s previously seldom shown drawings also display her profound preoccupation with rhythm, semiotics, and tactility. gently tap, hold and scratch ultimately refers back to her performative labor in that the delicate work of the artist is inextricably linked to the sculptural qualities of the produced constellations.

Andrea Kopranovic
(English translation: A. Flury & M. Taban)

MELANIE ENDER* 1984 Wien. Lives and works in Vienna.