Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to open this year’s exhibition program with new works by Molly Springfield and Andrea Geyer. In their media-reflexive works both artists explore the pictorial interpretation of time, trace and memory. While Molly Springfield’s medium is drawing, Andrea Geyer uses photography and video. 

Molly Springfield (born 1977, lives and works in Washington, D.C.) shows her installation This document from 2014. With these drawings, she responds to one of the most influential texts of art theory by Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler that was published in Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking study Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966-1972. For her work, Springfield selected a short passage from the text and depicted it in twenty large format sheets. En detail she draws fragments of the sentence from a photocopy of the book page. The graphite drawings do not only reproduce an excerpt from the text, but they are complete with marginalia, underlinings and page creases left on the pages in the processes of reading and photocopying. Enlarged 400 percent and abstracted through the fragmentation, the material and pictorial qualities of text and language itself come into focus.

Douglas Huebler’s passage describes his own central notion and elucidates his artistic strategy when he writes: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or place.” Parallels to Molly Springfield’s artistic approach become apparent as she seems to make the photographic reproduction of an original the subject of her meticulous drawings. This reading of her work would be too short-sighted though, because it is not a random copy of the book, but the artist’s personal copy, the notes and underlinings are hers. She already read the book toward the end of her college years, a fact which prompts the idea that to her this is not merely any book on art theory, it offers a key to her art. In This document a historical source congeals into personal memory. 

Especially in the United States, Molly Springfield’s work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions and her works are in the collections of renowned institutions like the Whitney Museum in New York. 

A limited-edition leporello is published coinciding with the exhibition Molly Springfield This document.