Dorp

3-5 Crown Close, Fish Island,
London E3 2JH
Open by appointment only

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+44 7866 910 778


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Two Pairs

Kim Stolz
15.05 - 14.06.26
London, United Kingdom


Kim Stolz (b.1995) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Recent shows include Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf and YveYANG, New York.


 I

In 1824, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, a man best known for his work with animal fats and their applications in industrial soap and candle manufacturing, was appointed Director of Dye Works at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris. In response to numerous complaints about the technical deficiencies of the dyes, he authored a study: De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, finding, scientifically, that the dyes weren’t at fault; it was our eyes.

His findings would become foundational to later theories of colour and perception, influencing generations of artists, poets, and thinkers, and perhaps most notably, Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s simultanism: the idea that complementary colours placed side by side enhance each other’s intensity, causing a surface to vibrate, move, or shimmer.


II

‘Embroidery (The Artist’s Mother)’ is a work by Georges Seurat, a drawing of a woman in a darkened room, sewing. Less well-known than his paintings, the artist’s drawings use Conté crayon to create a thick, velveteen darkness that seems to consume the compositions themselves. Like a layer of carpet or soot, in this composition a figure emerges from swollen shadow, face rendered almost plaster-cast, calcified by blanketed, powdery dusk. Though made well over a century ago, the drawing is reminiscent of radiation static, television pixels, radio interference. If the work had a sound, it might be the low hum of a generator, whirring.


–


Kim Stolz and I speak on facetime a few weeks before the exhibition at Dorp, just as the final paintings are being selected. Stolz describes her practice, in part, as a search for ways of creating space within a painting, and particularly guided by an interest in how painters throughout history have returned to the same formal questions. How does a surface begin to move? How to depict light? How does space emerge from colour, line, form?


— Lydia Earthy



List of works