This fall, The Gallery at 1GAP is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Austrian-American artist, Nicola Ginzel. The show highlights Ginzel’s intimate assemblages made from found objects, as well as works made through a process called frottage, a termcoined by Max Ernst to explain a method of rubbing one object onto another to create an imprint or an impression. Just like the more sculptural pieces, this work is done by hand and goes through several states of change, often taking years to complete.

On one level, the work is a meditation on consciousness or an exhortation of mindfulness, a concept from Zen Buddhism. On another, it is a continuous prying at the intuitive underpinnings of rational systems. The everyday materials the artist turns into art amounts to personal stuff found in a jacket pocket, or alongside pennies in a small dish: ticket stubs, chewing gum, rubber bands, scraps of clothing, soap, zippers, candy wrappers, match books, balls of wax. Such ephemeral objects often appeal to a child whose flexible, imaginative mind is more situated in the present moment. But Ginzel shows us that these bits which we discard are talismans of memory, artifacts of culture, and remnants of language. 

The artist says that after people see her work, they tell her they look at ordinary things differently. Perhaps because she has skillfully manipulated the small thing, altering the surface or melding it into another small object using materials like wax, paint, embroidery, gold leafing, plaster, wood, until the ordinary takes on new life.  Her painterly touch, and her sense of color evoke the body and soul: pinks, browns, reds, gold, sunsets, snow, flowers, the gold of Christmas, an outline of Hebrew. Ginzel’s intimate works connect their own material history to our present time and space, collapsing the mundane and extraordinary with poetic precision. 

Suzy Spence, Curator, New York, September 2017