Thomas Erben Gallery is excited to present  “ ….. ” , a tightly curated exhibition with works by Ivana Dama, Yamini Nayar, David Ostrowski and Tant Yunshu Zhong.

Working in the mediums of assemblage, photography, painting and sound, these artists – aided by their choice of materials – create open sites, uncharted territories of possibility in waiting. The unease in our current moment of overlapping crises is present with the slowly rising and falling sound of sirens incorporated into Dama’s work, artifacts dating from the 1990s Balkan wars. The use of materials is precarious, exemplified by Zhong holding her heap of thin, green fishing nets in place with a tensile construction. Similarly provisional are Ostrowski’s fleeting spray-painted gestures on white-on-white lacquered canvases, and Nayar’s constructed-for-the-camera table-top panorama, animated by a blur of pink paper strips and made permanent only as a photograph.

Visual and formal relations between individual works abound. Traces of spray paint in Nayar’s work, for example, find their material correspondence in Ostrowski’s paintings, and the dissolved coloration of both reverberate with the atmospheric field of green sitting atop Zhong’s suspended sheet of fabric. Ubiquitous is also the use of industrial materials, “found” in Zhong’s work, used to fabricate Dama’s, and painted with on Ostrowski’s canvases. The passage of time is made palpable both audibly, in the ebb and flow of the sound permeating the exhibition, and visually, by Nayar collaging image fragments of previous states onto her final work.

 The exhibition makes a case for the ability of abstraction to address our contemporary condition. It does so through the use of “the material”, amplifying its eloquence rather than proposing difficult to fathom solutions. Through their work, these artists reflect upon and sensitize us to the precariousness of the present, creating non-prescriptive yet productive vacuums through which new thoughts may emerge.

Ivana Dama (b. 1995, Belgrade, Serbia) is a sound artist and researcher, who was born and raised under the post-communist regime in Belgrade shortly after the end of the civil war and during the time of NATO bombing. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Sculpture at Yale University and holds a degree in Media Arts and Digital Humanities from UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture, where she is also the Assistant Director of the UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. Since 2016, she has shown within institutional contexts, staging exhibitions, performances and symposia.

Yamini Nayar (b. 1975) received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, 2005, and has been exhibiting with the gallery since 2006. Her work has been widely reviewed in such publications as Artforum, The New York Times, Art India, Vogue India, Art in America, or The New Yorker and included in major surveys at such institutions as the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; and The Empire Strikes Back, Saatchi Museum, London.

David Ostrowski (b. 1981, Cologne) lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Albert Oehlen and is a professor of painting at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe. His work gained substantial prominence in the late ’00s as part of the discussion surrounding Provisional Painting. Ostrowski is represented by Sprüth Magers and Ramiken. His work has been widely exhibited at major institutional venues including 1301SW, Melbourne; Bonner Kunstverein; Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; De La Cruz Collection, Miami; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; ICA London; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; to name very few.

Tant Yunshu Zhong (b. 1990, Wuhan) currently lives and works in Shanghai. After studying at East China Normal University, Shanghai, she received a MFA from the University of Arts, London, in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at Tabula Rasa Gallery, London and Beijing; Ullens Centre of Contemporary Art, Beidaihe; Tank Shanghai; and Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing. Her work comes to us through Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing.