Catalog publication “Nora Mona Bach – METAMORPHIT”

The catalog publication “METAMORPHIT” with texts by Kristina Bake, Ines Janet Engelmann and Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge was published by MMKoehn Verlag on the occasion of the awarding of the Art Prize of the State of Saxony-Anhalt to Nora Mona Bach in November 2024. It was funded by the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt.

To the catalog →

Works

Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

Superimpositions and blind mirrors - On the drawings of Nora Mona Bach (translation: Michael Turnbull / text excerpt from the catalogue ‚Nora Mona Bach – METAMORPHIT‘)

„[…] In the work of Nora Mona Bach, nature is not simply referred to in the motif portrayed, to what is usually called the subject; it also becomes visible in a particular way in the materiality the work utilizes. Nora Mona Bach has opted for pulverized charcoal, a deeply archaic material. The art historian Monika Wagner, in reference to the work of the artist Jannis Kounellis, writes that it “has left natural history behind it, while its cultural history as energy storage still lies before it.”
Although charcoal dust can hardly serve as reservoir of fuel, its very special aura, which goes beyond its aesthetic aspect, can still be felt.
In this temporally double position between the evolution of the Earth and the future of humankind, charcoal
seems to be in possession of a special mythical charge and to be connected with nature. It is the result of a transformation process one might almost wish to call alchemical. As wood subjected to burning under the controlled exclusion of oxygen, it seems only just to have escaped destruction, and yet in the hand of an artist it has the potential for infinite creation.
So the material applied contains the magic of transformation, which it transfers to the paper. One property of drawing is the remarkable way in which mark and surface marry and interpenetrate. The molecules of charcoal dust infiltrate the surface of the paper and saturate it with their presence. By absorbing the particles like a darkening cloud of dust, the paper becomes a material part of the sphere of carbon.
The mainly charcoal-dominated, planar, gray-black compositions of previous years have recently been joined by drawings in color. Pastel sits next to charcoal on the paper. The color orbits colorlessness, frames it, and obstructs it; thrusts into view as a semitransparent wedge, or transits the visual field diagonally—like the signal flying from an invisible mast, raised to halt a movement. Nora Mona Bach speaks of color as an “offer to the audience,” a siren call, a bridge into the image. It smooths the path where it might seem too stony, rugged, grim, dusty, and forbidding. Suddenly an edge or streak lights up, and tension arises between the color and the gray. It’s like a renegotiation of space and boundary between two different spheres—the way
cold and warm or solid and fluid converge or remain in stark opposition.
The image as slip rock, as quarry, but also as cloud bank and patchwork, as crumbling, deteriorating surface, nebulous and streaky—all these phenomena arise like the shimmer of an over–hot summer’s day, or like the chilling cold of a frosty winter morning, when the breath turns
to vapor.
The Epistle of James states: “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14). And the painter John Constable, who looked skywards like no one else in order to study the spectacle of the clouds, saw painting as a branch of natural philosophy, and pictures as its experiments. However it may be, ephemeral pictorial occurrence or atomizing pictorial fact blur the vision without the image having to become too concrete. But one thing is certain, and that is the formal-material situation, the distribution and densification of pigment on a flat surface. The stain as creative nucleus always appears in art where precise composition cannot or should not establish itself. Where the plan remains un-
fixed. Where the idea wanders unhooked.
When drawing was invented during the European Renaissance as intellectual art—or the drawing that already existed was ennobled into an intellectual act— concept took on the form of line. Disegno was differentiation and dissociation from rampant wonder and formless seeking. And yet the cloud, the diffuse, the nebulous is the primeval mud of creation, the opposite of rational invention, and the other side of the coin. This dialectic needs both growth and construction.
In his Treatise on Painting, from around 1500, Leonardo quotes his artist colleague Sandro Botticelli, who recommended hurling a soaked sponge against the wall to gain imaginative impulses, particularly for the composition of landscapes. And in the eighteenth century the British landscape painter Alexander Cozens developed a “theory of blots,” which enabled him to
bring the genius of controlled chance into being through spontaneity and automatism. Disintegration and growth come together in the blot; interpretation becomes diffuse and fluid. Every spatter is the sign of an energy discharged towards the paper. And on the paper the pulverized gestures contract and then diverge, and the splashes and stains rebound from the image.
Before postwar art reached its first major manifestation in informalism and the various forms of lyrical abstraction, the apparently formless, the fluid and amorphous, the iridescent and atmospheric, in which material and subject are still in abeyance, is prefigured in nineteenth- century works such as the paintings of William Turner, which incline to translucence, or the dark Romantic drawings of the French writer Victor Hugo.
Nora Mona Bach’s drawings are therefore made on the one hand from the material, which, like a geological memory, tells of past sediments, of the dusty, stony deep strata of the Earth, but also of the growth of plants and their proliferating form-worlds. Amid the diffuse textures, all kinds of vegetal silhouettes emerge. Some in soft focus, as if behind frosted glass, some sharply outlined, they stand out from the background, recalling papercuts or photograms. […]“

Zitiert aus dem Katalog / Quoted from the catalogue:

Nora Mona Bach – METAMOPRHIT

Texte: Kristina Bake, Ines Janet Engelmann, Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

Gestaltung: Maria Magdalena Meyer, 88 Seiten, Hardcover
ca. 60 Abbildungen

24×26 cm

978-3-910640-00-9 
(deutsch / englisch) 
32€
MMKoehn Verlag, Leipzig / November 2024



Nora Mona Bach ⇒