Gabriela Vainsencher

Asya Geisberg Gallery is proud to present “Basis”, an exhibition of porcelain sculpture by Gabriela Vainsencher. The artist’s second exhibition at the gallery shows Vainsencher transitioning from a bodily oriented depiction of fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, to a more structural and formally experimental exploration. Vainsencher embellishes with varying textures, pinching the clay with her fingers, carving images into the clay, juxtaposing matte and shiny glazes, to suggest drawing, painting, or printmaking. The white marks of ultrasounds evoke charcoal, and swirl as if in some primordial soup within the black of the womb.

Vainsencher alternates between two gestures at antiquity - the amphora vase shape, and the portrait cameo - pivoting to asymmetric, unbalanced, and odd silhouettes. Themes echo from the past few years with an amplification or a twist. For instance, “Hope”, the largest work in the exhibition, revisits a woman farcically squeezed upside down inside a bottle, but here the woman is larger than life. The style in turn is now concretely reflective of Picasso as an avatar of depicting women objectified, suffering, or in repose. “Hope” makes literal the feeling of being trapped or stuck inside the role of mother, twisted into a pretzel trying to assist anyone but herself. The title points to the hand reaching outside the bottle, with a sort of tool or weapon - symbolizing agency, escape, or rebirth.

Vainsencher’s figuration charts more playful, surreal and even baroque territory. The ultrasounds stretch the language of medical imagery into fantastical scenes: instead of trapezoidal documents, they are fragmented, or otherwise disconnected from their utility as fact. They start to suggest landscapes, as do the more literal swirls of wavy water in “A Night Storm”, or perhaps an alien life form, as in "Plant Life”. Two nonfunctional vases made of planar pairs augment the show’s interplay of 2-D and 3-D, with interlocking flattened silhouettes cutting through each other in “Intersecting Vases”, or parallel opposite each other in “Looking Out”. 

Landscape, windows, and seascapes push the exhibition outside of interiority, while a collection of portraits acts as Greek chorus, observing, or perhaps quietly judging. Vainsencher’s visceral unidealized work suggests that the pleasures of having a child are in tandem with the anxiety of gestation, the dangers of birth, and the struggles of child-raising, as they bind humanity throughout eras - and in our contemporary moment, can finally be discussed and dissected in manifold ways.