DOCUMENT is pleased to present Blank Pages, an exhibition of new work by Anneke Eussen. This is the gallery’s first solo show with Eussen and the artist’s first gallery presentation in Chicago.
In Blank Pages, Eussen utilizes the formal principles of Minimalism evoking geometric seriality, yet deploys a quietly emotive aspect by implying hidden narratives and secret histories. Her practice revolves around cultivating found materials and repurposing them into meticulously detailed and ghostly wall sculptures. The artist compiles found glass panels sourced from buildings and automobiles into glass assemblages in clean-edged plexiglass boxes. Contrasting these ethereal glass works, Eussen suspends slabs of marble to the wall by fastening them with geometric vertical black rope holds. Her use of negative space can imply a thing that has outlived its intended purpose and has been reincarnated. She leaves markers of their past—outlines of where a sticker would have been attached, faint residues, and small nicks. Through interventions of layering, arrangement, and assembly, Eussen is never manipulating the original shape of the objects and insists on using their original framework.
Eussen’s interest in the malleability of edges and borders emerges from growing up in a Dutch town neighboring Germany and Belgium where the delineation of countries seemed redundant and arbitrary. Questioning the idea of the border through overlapping, Eussen also questions the linguistic and political construction of borders. Temporal divisions are perhaps as significant as spatial ones in Eussen’s assemblage. The dark marble sourced from the State Library in Berlin, re-assembled for Little Triumph 02, references Berlin’s particular history of shifting borders–a reference perhaps furthered by the use of time-stained car windows, like those of the now extinct East German Trabant. Eussen evokes a history popping in and out of existence with the erection and fall of border walls, containing both specificity and a frustrating indecipherability. Retaining an undeniable anonymity, the materials prompt open-ended questions: Who looked through this glass? Whose face once reflected on its surface? The works emanate the tangibility of human contact, visualizing the sensuous connection between past, present, and future through our relationship with built space.
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Anneke Eussen lives and works in the Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Maastricht followed by a post-graduate residency at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Belgium. Solo exhibitions include ‘Present Portal’ at Marinaro, New York (USA), ‘Little Triump’ at Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), Park Platform for Visual Arts, Tilburg (NL) (duo with Bram Braam), ‘Circle lines,’ Cruise&Callas, Berlin (DE), ‘NEUBAU Stuck,’ LSD Gallery, Berlin (DE) and ‘Close to what’s real,’ Highlight Gallery, San Francisco (USA). Group exhibitions include ‘disorder (REPEAT), DMW, Antwerp (BE), ‘Recyclage / Surcyclage, Fondation Villa Datris, L’Isle- sur-la- Sorgue (FR), ‘Listen to the Stones, Think like a Mountain,’ (curator Evelien Bracke), Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), BORG2014, a biennale for contemporary art in Antwerp (BE), Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL), CC De Bond, Bruges (BE), The Wand, Berlin (DE) and Ainsi Building, Maastricht (NL).
