Soy Capitán passage • Berlin–Charlottenburg • 16.09.–11.11.2023
Soy Capitán passage – the gallery’s second space located at Fasanenstr. 29 in Berlin-Charlottenburg exists as an extension to the gallery. passage is an independent space for the presentation of additional works and providing room for events other than the gallery’s program. Situated in the Fasanen-Passage, it appears amidst many varying galleries and other art spaces in the neighborhood.
For the inauguration we present new works by Grace Weaver to accompany her exhibition Laundry in the gallery space in Kreuzberg.
“In Weaver’s paintings, everything is slightly larger-than-life and ill-fitting. The figures appear superficial and comically flat, their limbs line up clumsily as they form what Amy Sillman has called “this laughable casement that is the body“. These body casements are cased in another case, that is, the painting’s frame. As the bodies bend over to pick up the laundry from the floor, it seems as if they’re squeezing into the shallow pictorial space to fit the tight edges of the canvas. The domestic space becomes a Beckettian closed space fiction, inhabited by characters ready to perform the everyday claustrophobic tragicomedy of a body feeling out of joint.”
“In another series shown at Soy Capitán’s new and second location, Weaver’s female protagonists are strangely positioned over or rather next to their laptops. Surrounded by the usual stuff of the everyday – a phone, a charger, food, drinks and some unidentifiable objects that aren’t more than simple shapes or lines – the women gaze at the screen that the painting’s flat perspective and disarticulation of the conventions of geometric space wouldn’t actually allow them to see. With one hand attached to the mouse or one finger pressing on a key, they stare and squint into the nothingness of the vast depth of the internet. These scenes deftly portray the strange somatic and spatial sensations of the digital age: the weirdness of having a material but rather flat body vis-à-vis a relatively immaterial yet deep cyberspace.”
“Perhaps Weaver’s paintings feel akin to poetry because these simplified gestures remind more of the abstractions of writing than the representations of figurative painting. But unlike the writing page, the painting’s surface leaves no space for corrections. Painting wet-in-wet with over-sized brushes, Weaver adds oil color on a dark and damp background and as she works into it with both pale and bright colors, the greys and blacks stain and seep into every brushstroke, whereby every tiny movement of the brush, and hence, every thought and mistake are inevitably registered.”
–Sophia Rohwetter