JANINA ROIDER
MAKE IT NEWER!
A hybrid dream landscape
EIGEN+ART LAB, Berlin
Solo show
29 October – 28 November 2020
In this new, monographic exhibition, the Munich- and Montalivet-based artist Janina Roider (b. 1986) transports gallery-goers to landscapes where the real and the fictive, actuality and dream, the aesthetics of advertising and the painting manner of the Old Masters enter into a creative symbiotic relationship.
The exhibition’s title MAKE IT NEWER! is a reference to Roider’s Academy teacher Günther Förg, whose guiding principle and maxim “make it new” – a dictum borrowed from Ezra Pound, whose work Förg greatly admired – served also as the title of his trail-blazing solo exhibition of 2004, which formed part of the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen, Germany. Förg’s works – which were to prove seminal for Roider’s understanding of painting – stand apart, outside the painterly discourse of classical modernism. In his view, the painter should abandon his or her solitary and élitist position and the concomitant intellectual mindset framed in the specific period and should no longer have to offer a direct explanation of his or her selfhood and work.
The original motivational thrust of modern art is always its urge for renewal. In the formal language of Roider’s oeuvre, this impulse invariably leads to a fusing of digital and analogue processes. The basis for each work is a hand-drawing, which is digitalized – with her sculptures, this takes the form of a digital print – and then expanded almost in the mode of the Old Masters through successively “applied” layers. In the next step, the digital drawing is turned into a print (designed for serial reproduction) and so becomes Roider’s canvas and support.
The eye of the beholder is called on, challenged to immerse itself in the resultant works, to study their images meticulously so as to be able to distinguish, in the given case, between digital and analogue painting processes. Roider’s works invite one to abandon oneself to a world full of delight in life, full of a relish for faraway climes and human physicality, and to delve deep down into discovery and painting. In playful manner, references to art history (such as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, 1485-86), advertising aesthetics (such as the further development of Dik Browne’s “Miss Chiquita”, 1944) and patterns of collective memory (such as Jerry Siegel’s and George Roussos’ “Superwoman”, which first appeared in action comics in 1943) merge with topical (and self-reflexive) issues of gender-allocation, of the new role of the (empowered) woman, of individually lived sexuality and of the achievement of personal freedoms/liberation from convention in one’s own life project and style.
Sarah Haugeneder
About the Artist
Janina Roider (b. 1986 in Dachau, Germany) lives and works in Munich and Montalivet, France. At the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, she first studied Art Education under Matthias Wähner, before transferring into the Class of Günther Förg in order to pursue the Liberal Arts. She graduated there in 2015 with the title of Master Pupil. In 2010/2011, she spent a year abroad studying at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. During her student years, she held a Scholarship of the Federal Support Programme for the Gifted, Ev. Studienwerk V.illigst e.V. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Working Scholarship from the Arts Support Programme of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
translated by Richard Humphrey