ADD TO MY LIBRARY VOL .II – A SOLO EXHIBITION BY CHRISTINA MITRENTSE
29 August-25 September 2011. Opening/performance Wednesday 7 September 6.00-9.30pm

ART WORK SPACE –THE HEMPEL HOTEL , 31-35 Craven Hill Gardens, London W2 3EA, Paddington station

Art Work Space is delighted to present Add To My Library Vol.II, a solo exhibition of works by established multi-faceted artist Christina Mitrentse. The show consists of five interconnected parts produced over the last two years. A series of large-scale graphite and colour pencil drawings on paper created through an innovative methodology that depicts books as the building-blocks of idiosyncratic institutions; STONEHENGE, WWW, NEW TATE, EMBLEM,RUINS I,will fill the main walls of the gallery. An ON-LINE BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA FLOW of favorite book titles/authors,selected by invited international contributors from the art world. METABOOK, plinth-mounted silk-screened book sculpture; 10 FLAGS/ EMBLEMS silk-screens extracted from METABOOK form a wall-based installation and a spoken word performance by guest artist Douglas Park who will embody the Library’s body of knowledge as a living ENCYCLOPAEDIA.The men who became a book!

Performance by Douglas Park. Print Editions by Jonas Ranson. Publication design by Aeon Rose.Photography by Dominic Mifsud.

Press: Bakul bakul@planb.uk.com /07984 462 358 , Gallery director: Naomi Murtagh naomi@artworkspace.co.uk /07515 797 877

Book upon Book upon Book: Christina Mitrentse

By Peter Suchin Art critic , Artist ,Contributor Art Monthly

“This whole enabling structure is now much eroded.” [1]

“Everything, in the world,” wrote the poet Stephane Mallarme, “exists to end up in a book”. [2] With respect to the work of Christina Mitrentse the direction of this tendency appears to be, at first sight at least, reversed. She instead makes, even if they are sometimes only representations, novel physical objects as well as complex architectural structures out of books, book-containers made of books, libraries whose walls are bound and bonded together with books, labyrinthine conceptual structures – often realised in pencil and colour – effectively formed of strings of titles stacked or, threaded together.

Drawing on the traditional form of the book and not its digitised or revamped or “remarketed” version – the “Kindle”reading device, for example – Mitrentse presents compact yet oddly comical and far-reaching repertoires of libraries displaced as mazes, art galleries, plinths, tombs or ruins. One thinks of John Soane indirectly depicting his own grand architectural conceits as future ruins, as the Modern become “Classical” almost in advance of itself. [3] The utopia of the library has become the dystopia of cultural ruin, decline, desecration, an imagined future in which knowledge is left to decay, crumble and collapse.

The paradox of Mitrentse’s project is that it is both a sign of dissipation, of the loss of knowledge and the means for its transmission, and a conscious recouping or preservation of the culture of the book. At a moment when established institutions of learning are, in England anyway, in crisis, with universities simultaneously charging highly increased student fees whilst purporting to democratise access to education, Mitrentse focuses not so much on this ostensible cultural expansion as upon notions of the alternative, the marginal and the secret school or anti-institution. Her large drawings of accumulated books are sourced via a request that any individual who so wishes suggests a book for inclusion within a given work. These book proposals then become the literal building blocks of the structures within the drawings, a library the contents of which have been determined by its imaginary users, and not by those in power who would seek to constrict and contain the culture of the book.

Notes

1. George Steiner, Extraterritorial, Peregrine, 1975, p. 166.
2. [Stephane] Mallarme, The Poems, Penguin, 1977, p. 49.
3. On Soane commissioning paintings from Joseph Gandy showing the former’s architectural works in ruins see Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, Chatto & Windus, 2001, chapter VIII.

Online Press:

http://interartive.org/index.php/2011/08/mitrentse-interview/

http://ratcommander.blogspot.com/2011/07/add-to-my-library-vol-ii-christ...

http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/659131