Surya Gied

Artist: Surya Gied

          

Website: www.suryagied.de

Works at: Seoul Art Space_GeumCheon

Stays in: 2013

Genre: Painting, Installation

Profile: 
Education
2008 Master of Fine Arts at Berlin University of the Arts, Class of Prof. Valérie Favre

Solo exhibition
2012 This Is Original Korean Paper, Infernoesque, Berlin
2010 Iowa goes Nuts, Beauty Shop, Iowa, USA

Group exhibition
2013 RE-MADE // RE-USED, REH Kunst, Berlin
       Non Space, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
       In Motion, Embassy of the Rebublic of Korea , Berlin
2012 boesner art award (Shortlist), Märkisches Museum Witten
       Positioning Osmotic Impulses, former prison of Berlin-Neukölln
       SNO@BHO, Ballhaus Ost, Berlin
2011 Fast and Furious Goldrausch 2011, Halle am Wasser, Berlin
       Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin
2010 Rampe, Parkhaus Projects, Berlin
       Projekt für die Gegenwart, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin
       Wir können auch anders, Bourouina Gallery, Berlin
       The eternal reoccurrence of everything, workspace, Los Angeles, USA
       Constructs Assemblage No.4 Wallwork Olivier Mosset, SNO, Sydney

2009 Conscience and Frontiers, Alte Post Neukölln, Berlin
       In Flux, The Door Gallery, Seoul
       6from4, NSpace Gallery, Seoul

Project
2010
FensterFrontFestival, Theorie- und Praxisgemeinschaft Fahimi, Berlin
I wish myself an exhibition…, West Germany, Berlin
Pancake Astronaut, The Forgotten Bar Project, Berlin
 
Grants, Stipends
2011   Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT, Berlin, Professional    Development Course for Female Artists
2009   Postgraduate Grant from German Academic Exchange Service           (DAAD) for Seoul, South Korea
 

Works:
 

Surya Gied

My work deals with invasion of the space through painting. To extend and widen the painting is my intention. It is about expansion into the height, the width and depth, to win over ground (wall, ceiling, floor, space) and to think beyond that. Everything belongs together and influences each other. I go from there and explore the factors that influence one’s perception, interpretation and understanding of color in space.

 

Appropriating Space through Site-specificity

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (PhD)

 

For a trip into Surya Gied’s multi-facetted practice, one could take off from numerous points of departure. But I will focus on Gied's use of space. Unlike most painters who rely on the support of the walls of an art space for their works to gain their fullest scope, Gied (Cologne, 1980) has over the last four years used the entire space as a pedestal. The play on pedestal is in fact intended, so as to bring in the idea of sculpture, but at the same time distance her work from the sculptural -- or our conception of sculpture, which is typically self-referential and placeless, suits a multiplicity of spaces, and in its completion does not have the chance to react to the realities of the site in which it is shown.

 

Gied is a painter who presents her paintings in the form of an installation. It is important to note that these works are not simply installed works, but rather a composition of single entities –paintings and other elements- that must be appreciated for the singularities of the elements as well as for the plurality of the whole. As Rosalyn Deutsche aptly put it, and as paraphrased by Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another: Notes On Site Specificity, there is a distinction between an assimilative model of site specificity – in which the art work is geared toward 'integration' into the existing environment to produce a unified and 'harmonious' space of wholeness and an interruptive model, where the art work functions as a critical 'intervention' into the existing order of a site.1)

 

Gied's site specific works seesaw between these two poles. Take for example the piece <Rampensau> (2010), where she blends screeching neon-colored paper to the railings of a parking lot and completely integrates the piece into the environment; or <Plattensammlung> (2010), which is a composition of paintings in the stairway of an exhibition space, thereby distracting from the intended exhibition space, and questioning the audacity of a certain idea and politics of an exhibition space; or the piece <L(arge)> (2011), which through its size and intervention in the exhibition space, through its appropriation and integration of other elements and its multidimensionality, questions our understanding of painting. In pieces like <Fountain Wall> and <Falling in Love> (both 2013), the associations to a deconstructivist understanding of object or even an allusion to a sort of 'anarchitecture' within space can be witnessed.

 

So, while Gied's work is not intended as institutional critic or to reveal the faults, foes and woes of the art system, it still in its capacity as site specific work very much decodes and/or recodes the conventions, perceptions and conceptions of space. Not only does her work respond to the topography, the architectonics, lighting or structure of the spaces in which they are installed, but also demand of the space, of its concept, and of the spectators/audience to succumb to the works' concepts and context. What’s more, the works intervene into space and change the way the space functions or how one functions in the space.