From Within // Niels Plata

In the organizer's words:

Niels Plata, born in Düsseldorf in 1992, studied fine art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and graduated in 2022 as a master student under Professor Tomma Abts.

In his work, the artist focuses on painting, but also creates ceramics that are presented as part of small-scale installations.

These take up discourses on the transformation of the human body, such as those addressed in science and science fiction films and computer games.

The question is to what extent physical or natural boundaries can or must be overcome by internal or external circumstances. These are questions that fit into an age in which people believe they have left the limits of nature behind them with the help of technology and medicine.

For Niels Plata, the work of director David Cronenberg, whose explicit film language and form of representation of body transformation have shaped the genre of body horror, plays an important role here.

The figurative elements created in Plata's working process remain rather shadowy and leave the viewer room for interpretation, whereby the latter can quickly establish a connection to the interpretation of form, which is used in psychoanalysis, for example.

In this exhibition, Niels Plata shows an installation consisting of several small sculptures that function as the source bodies for a fountain system. He examines the extent to which normative ideas of beauty and aesthetics can be broken and thwarted. A visual language of fragmented body parts scattered across the floor and walls reverses the original function of relaxing a home fountain and possibly triggers a feeling of unease in the viewer. This installation is complemented by painterly works that can be understood as an extension of this narrative.