Fairs

Frieze Seoul
​2022
​
Vivian Greven
Your Skin Is My Shield

September 2–5, 2022
Booth A36, Hall C, COEX (fair map)

Frieze Viewing Room, Seoul Edition
Online, August 26–September 6, 2022

Installation views / Works / Press release / Related Press

Gallery Vacancy is delighted to announce Vivian Greven’s solo presentation, Your Skin Is My Shield, for the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul, featuring her recent painting series. Coupling concepts of beauty prevalent in classical antiquity with contemporary digital aesthetics, Greven’s painting is finely deliberated through various notions of bodies, being and representation. Dwelling in color harmonies and illusionist cut-outs or reliefs, her imagery vacillates between figuration and abstraction, creating an alluring, evocative, yet sometimes unsettling aura.

Your Skin Is My Shield draws on the fragility of inner- and social- human issues of connectedness and separateness. Skin as the protective organ sets the boundaries between physical bodies. It shields an individual’s corporeal vulnerability yet initiates the intuitive desires to touch and to be intimate. Subtly flirting with the contradiction between subject and object, isolation and enclosure, classic and contemporary, Greven prompts the possibilities of sensual and spiritual contacts, raising questions on the connectivity within self and among others, as well as the potentiality to touch beyond historical hierarchy and through digital screens.

Grazia V (2022) derives from the historically significant sculpture of The Three Graces by Antonio Conova. As a perennial subject in art history, the notion of beauty and grace is bound within holiness, which is in connection with the universal balance between the immortal and the ephemeral. Greven premises the virtual reproductions of the heavenly bodies as the optimization of the human form, yet approaches from a sensuous perspective—the intangible idea of grace resembles in the substantial experience of touching through the alluring smoothness of her surface.

The metallic figures contrast with the surrealistic drapes gently wrapped around them. The soft blue gradient of the fabric illustrates a level of idealization and digitalization that is evident in contemporary image aesthetics. In Tic II (2022), full-figures are fragmented to nude torsos, where the act of cropping corresponds to digital image editing. Greven’s painting is characteristic of our present time which is heavily shaped by the internet and social media, underlying the loss of integrity in contemporary body politics; thus dissolving the hierarchies of images between original, reproduction, and simulation.

​In Crac III (2022), the embracing figures are shrouded in glooming luminosity; the immaculacy of their bodily surface was at once implicative of translucent marble or reflective metal, but now incarnated as the electronically fluorescent screen. Veiled in an uncanny, X-ray like effect, the clinging figures emit a sense of weightless-ness. The entanglement of their limbos spawns a puzzle of intimacy, where the action of hugging falls into mystery—it is beyond recognizable to separate one from another. They invoke and stimulate one’s gaze, the pleasure in looking and desire to approach, yet disrupt and irritate. A single blood-red color block aggressively cracks through the surface, the knife shape of which implies the stigmatization, objectification, and wounding of the body, allowing the viewers to be guided in their perception by certain signs whilst turning bodies into targets.

Simultaneously in Leea IV (2022) and Leea V (2022), Greven substitutes the fleshness of the body with gradually radiant color fields that dissolve into the play of lights and shades. The body exists in the state between absence and presence, and is ironed out of its corporeality and transcends into a ghost replica of the originality. This unreality at the threshold of the real clandestinely intervenes between the object and the image, self and other, touch and detachment. Greven claims the significance of emptiness, confronting the solution of perfection, and interrogating new possibilities of the authentic self and how it’s positioned in inter-human connections and beyond human existence.

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