Marianne VitaleOh Don’t Ask Why

Marianne Vitale (*1973 East Rockaway, USA) presents steel sculptures taller than a person, whose origins in rail transport are plain to see, in combination with expansive installations, such as a wooden Wild West bar whose base still bears the traces of use left by visitors. At the back of the bar, bizarre plaster masks are set up against a black background, each of them formulated somewhere between the creepy and the comic. Her third group of works is devoted to surfaces, such as old patched tar roofs, which she calls Roof or Shingle Paintings. This enigmatic body of work casts a further spotlight on the great American narrative and its failure. The artist unravels the bizarre element of it in her text “Rituals of Transformations throughout the Great Frontier,” in which she recalls that in the America of the westward expansion women were forbidden to be near smelting furnaces while they were menstruating; in Wisconsin, indeed, there is a saying that in smelting “the slag runs like a woman’s monthly bleeding.”

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 1/5–6/6/2015