Galerie Barbara Thumm \ Chloe Piene

$Galerie Barbara Thumm \ Chloe Piene$

\Chloe Piene

Chloe Piene, *1972 in the USA,
lives and works in New York, USA and Warsaw, Poland

Chloe Piene is an artist known for the primacy of her drawing: “a transformative voice as nowhere else.”*1. Her work has been called brutal, delicate, figurative, forensic, erotic and fantastic. She is esteemed for her unique and penetrating line, anchored in bone and the peculiar language of anatomy.

Her work has made various and diverse associations with prisoners, love letters, failure, and heroic transformation. Her video and sculpture utilize the greater sensory impact of noise, time, and shadow to render the more subterranean levels of experience. Piene’s work looks to history for the use and meaning of ancient and modern material – she sculpts from wax, iron, lead and steel. Her installations make what is heavy float and what is dense, gaseous, or ghostly; Death is light, and Death is heavy; Piene forcefully accommodates both.

Of her work it has been written:

„Piene’s œuvre lives, pulses in the now raking light of that legendary Germanic dawn of Hegel and Hölderlin when Greek seemed an Ur-tongue. For the ancients there was a greater ‘rest,’ the sacred pagan core marked by ritual ‘sacrifice’ in which every public act was embedded. The visual arts had no Muse of their own, nor a word for pictura, the ‘art of painting’, only the neologism zoögraphia, ‘life-writing’; their captors the Romans remained caught in the trope, along with so much else Greek, employing the term graphis for ‘drawing’, leaving the work of ‘shaping’ art to the realm of fictio. It was the contests of tragic drama, cult as much as culture and performed under the ægis of Dionysos, the most ancient of Greek deities, in his guise as Eleuthereus (Liberator), that focused the collective choral energies of the otherwise volatile and polemic polis to a performative white heat. Here mythic material offered ‘women words’, as the Oresteia had it, a transformative voice as nowhere else.”*1

Piene is collected and exhibited internationally. Collections include: Die Stattlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Staatlichen Museen Berlin, Kupfertisch Kabinett, Sammlung-Hoffmann Koenige, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Selected exhibitions of note, „FIGURE/S: Drawing After Bellmer“ The Drawing Room, London, UK. 2021; Selections from The Guerlain Collection at The Pompidou“ The Albertina, Wien, 2019; “Schiele Reloaded“, Leopold Museum, Wien, 2018; “Drawing Now” The Albertina Musem, Wien, 2016; „Les Maitres du Desordre“ Musée des Arts Premiers, quai Branly, Paris, 2012; “Bodies of Desire: Works on paper by Willem de Kooning and Chloe Piene” Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2007; The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum, New York, 2004.

*1
„Drawing Now”, Klaus Albrecht Schröder und Elsy Lahner with text by Warren Nieusłuchowski, The Stadlijk Museum vor Aktuelle Kunst, Ghent und Grafische Sammlung Albertina, Wien, Verlag Hirmer, 2015