NN Contemporary is pleased to present ‘Unfolding the Vaporous Mind’, a solo exhibition of new work from Gam Bodenhausen. Inspired by the landscape and architecture of Northampton, Bodenhausen has created drawings (on a monumental scale) that depict a language envisioned from the extracted yellow sandstone in the Northamptonshire quarries. Accentuating the constitution of the historical and the geological in all landscapes; the artist forges a unique world.
In soft grey pencil drawings, a universe develops that seems as overgrown as it is organised, as dreamy as it is sober. The artist deploys a material that consists entirely of carbon, as the building material of all life. Tracing the heritage of graphene to the English Lake District, she pays homage to the Romantics, where observing and drawing became an intellectual pursuit that shaped contemporary cultural ideologies.
Consciousness is presented as a drawing process, informed by an infinite and codependent stream of fiction and fact. Mark making, becomes a signifier of both reality and illusion, that both documents and describes. Images, structures, figures and objects are observed, analysed, and recomposed, deconstructing our order of vision, and with this, our conscious reality. Akin to water or the surrounding clouds, her work is durational. Oscillating with a languid flow, a dimension unfolds before the viewer in which things fluctuate across moments before dispersing into a new formation across time. We are invited to move between the worlds of the known and unknown, between what can be articulated, and what we intrinsically feel.
Bodenhausen studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and continued her Master training at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In 2016 she published her first book, Grey Horizontals. Highlights are presentations at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.
