Anita Groener is doing a research artist residency in PointB Worklodge, New York, through October 2014. On Wednesday, October 29, an Open Studios event will take place between 6-9 pm (at 71 North 7t Street), where one can meet and talk with the artist and see the work in progress.

The research residency follows the monumental site-specific drawings she installed during the last year in the RHA Gallery Dublin, Ireland, Witteveen Visual Arts Centre, Amsterdam, PARK, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Rubicon Projects Brussels, Belgium and for a private collection in Berlin, Germany.

Geopolitical reality

The focus in Anita Groener’s work is a consideration of home and displacement as situated within modern geopolitical realities. It explores episodes in individual and collective cultural histories – mired by dislocations – that become manifest through our relationship with time and space. Inextricably situated within collective systems [society, family, religion, politics, country, etc..] these structures inevitably cause conflict that vary from local to global proportions affecting each individual. The current work engages with the impact of the psychological complex that constitutes the core of this dialogue. To capture the actuality of this experience she uses strategies and economies of drawing, as well as formal aspects of scale and monochromes.

Disappear in a crowd

The drawing installations consist of minuscule individually cut paper silhouettes impaled on pins and mounted on a wall. The work is approached from a distance, emphasising the systematic and visually abstract on first view. On closer inspection each mark becomes an individual figure that, when standing back, disappears again into the crowd of marks while simultaneously positioning itself as essential for the emergence of that crowd and, as evidenced human experience.

Anita Groener’s work is in the collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Arts Council of Ireland, VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, Gemeente Arnhem, Leaseplan BV Nederland, DELA, The State Art Collection Ireland OPW, among many other major public and private collections in Europe.