20 May – 18 June 2023
Milos
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.
Installation views
Artist
Natacha Mankowski
Trained at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, Natacha Mankowski (Paris, FR, 1986) 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. The way she employs this technique allows her to create textural and spatial structures in her paintings that moves them into the realm of sculpture. In her new work Natacha Mankowski has intensified this spatial and sculptural effect by working with larger formats. With many of these new paintings weighing 15 to 20 kilograms and more, they acquire a singular sense of gravity and presence; indeed, these paintings are objects that themselves inhabit a space alongside the viewers. To address the question of how humans inhabit space at the intersection of nature and culture, Natacha Mankowski has developed her own visual and compositional language. While her compositions may seem abstract to the casual viewer, they are somewhat reminiscent of blueprints and ground maps widely used in architectural design and urban planning. This is no coincidence: many of her paintings are loosely inspired by the ground maps of the quarries she visited during her years as an architect. 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. And as such, the mines and quarries where these materials are found also raise difficult questions about how humans have turned nature into a site for commodification, a process that has brought us high-tech and the urban environment but has also triggered ecological ruin and collapse. Inspired by these issues, Mankowski has explored and visited many of these quarries, paying close attention to their geographical lay-out and the specific selection of raw materials on site. She then uses samples of these raw materials to create the thick impasto paint that texture her painterly work. Text by Bram Ieven Natacha Mankowski has exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, such as: Moly-Sabata for Biennale de Lyon, Zentrum fur Kunst ind Urbanistik (Berlin, GE) 2014 ; the Watermill Center (NY, USA) 2015, Pole muséal de Lisieux – Ateliers Intermédiaires (Lisieux, FR) 2015, Ceci Foundation (Berlin, GE) 2016, New Day Gallery (Berlin, GE) 2016, Souvenirs (Berlin, GE) 2016, the Epigraphic Museum (Athens, GR) 2018, Deschool and ISO (Amsterdam, NL), 2019, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble. She had several gallery shows at and is still working together with Everyday Gallery (2019 - 2022), Antwerp and Valerius Gallery (2022), Luxembourg City. She did a number of recidencies around the world and has been invited to teach at prestigious art schools like Sandberg Insitituut, Amsterdam. Mankowski is part of the Taylor Foundation in Paris and was the recipient of the Tony Garnier Prize, for Architecture and Urbanism awarded by the Académie Française d’Architecture in Paris.
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