Sim Smith is pleased to present Dreams are my Reality, Aneta Kajzer's first solo exhibition at the gallery. We first exhibited Kajzer in They Catch Feelings I Catch Bodies in 2019 with Jenna Gribbon, Kemi Onabulé and Anne Ryan. This exhibition marvels at the alchemy of Kajzer's paintings, across exuberant bold sweeping gestures where abstraction plays with traces of figuration. It is a special place created by Kajzer that sits somewhere between reverie, hallucination, and fantasy.
Kajzer is intrinsically connected to the works she constructs, as is each work to the next. She often sets to work on a new painting with a brush that was used on its predecessor, still with remnants of paint on its bristles. A clairvoyant of sorts, her marks link the past to pathways to the future, some with a brush, others with her hands, as she works across multiple canvases at once. They are stories intertwined across supernatural skies made from clouds of paint and the figures that live within them.
Kajzer works on the floor, in abstraction at first but at some point, something else emerges. She works close to the canvas, playing with the paint not knowing which way is up. She walks around the canvas, viewing it from all angles and then at a certain moment starts to conjure figures from the deep. A dot for an eye, a slash for a beak, figures in Kajzer's work range hugely from people to cartoon-like ducks, rabbits and more. These forms are humorous and sinister, beautiful and ugly. Kajzer shifts her gesture making between the intuitive to the planned in her works. She plays with floating veils of paint, mainly made with her hands, a flourish of soft, often pastel and shadowy hues. These hazy marks form a fanciful space for Kajzer to apply some contractions too with a few well placed, confident, brushstrokes which see various figures emerge.
The works span many magnitudes, affording Kajzer the physicality of working on a substantial scale and the intimacy and control of working on smaller works. She always works across diverse formats, with different energies which challenge both her body and mind.
An illusionist and storyteller, Kajzer works in an extraordinary space where the dimensional veneer between earthy and otherworldly realms become very thin. She expertly navigates the territories between abstraction and figuration in a heady, swirling parade that bestrides the celestial and the quotidian, dreams and reality.
About the Artist
Aneta Kajzer was born in 1989 in Katowice in Poland and lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Kunsthochschule Mainz and was awarded a residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2018, she participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, a development program for female visual artists. Her work is regularly exhibited, particularly in shows dedicated to the contemporary rejuvenation of German art such as Now ! Painting in Germany Today in Germany, shown at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz and Museum Wiesbaden in 2019-2020. She has also enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions, most notably at the Conrads Gallery in Düsseldorf, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and the Institut für Moderne Kunst in Nuremburg.
All welcome for the private view Saturday 4th March 3 - 5pm