In May and June, and during Amsterdam Art Week, Galerie Fleur & Wouter is showing a solo exhibition with Natacha Mankowski (Paris, 1986). Trained at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, the artist worked as an architect alongside Jean Nouvel and Vito Acconci before turning to painting. Her architectural background still resonates strongly in her paintings. Defying the boundaries between different artistic disciplines, Mankowski’s work is characterized by an exuberant use of the impasto technique and the use of her self made oil pastels, from materials she collects at the sites she researches.
During Amsterdam Art Week, on June 3, 14.00, the artist will present her new book in the gallery.
Mankowski takes a keen interest in sites such as stone quarries, from which architects and builders collect their raw materials. Midway between nature and the built environment, quarries are transitional sites in which natural resources are excavated and turned into raw commodities to be used in buildings, but also cell phones, computers, and other modern technologies. So as much as we would like to believe we are far removed from nature, through these rough materials we are intrinsically connected to it.
Titanium buff
Her new painting series Milos shows evanescent shades of titanium buff, off-white, pale pink, warm and violet gray and play with sulfuric tones of golden green and lemon yellow. Together those pale but acid nuances recall the rocky coast and volcanic past of the Greek Island of Milos.
A few months ago, Mankowski went to study Thiorichia, an abandoned area located on the East Coast of the Island. For years, it was the oldest sulfur mine in the entire Greece. It has been in operation for various decades, till it was closed down somewhere in 1960. Old architecture and machinery remains, as well as its rich ground full of Sulfur : the ‘devil’s gold’.
Mineral gardens
This new painting series is organized as a series of mineral gardens seen from the sky. A distant mountain, but also deserted lands, mines, quarries, and traditional buildings. All are represented by rectangular pastel pieces and mosaics of broken pastels. Brushed paint creates rivers and water inlets in the ground of this painted garden, or are they the paths of the many machines and bulldozers scrubbing the floor of Milos from its minerals? Along with some sulfuric stones brought back by the artist and set in the wet paint, the paintings bear the mark of the extraction past and present of Milos.
Articles about the exhibition