Jorinde Voigt. The Real extent at Konig Galerie Berlin

The torus has become a central perceptual model explored in Voigt’s artistic practice and visually unfolds the artist’s conviction that we as humans are “always in context and in contact” with the world surrounding us. The formal language that Voigt develops, as well as her approach to materials and process, resists false binaries like the self and the other or notions of interiority and exteriority in favor of poly-temporal and entangled spaces. The torus tends to be the first form that Voigt commits to paper, executed in a broad sweeping stroke that often radiates from the center of the paper as if charting out a space of possibility or a sphere of action. Although intuitive and expressive, Voigt’s mark-making evolves from a nonetheless rigorous meditative and observational process. She begins by submerging large sheets of paper in pigment to imbue them with a specific mood or attitude. In The Match, an amorphous, organ-like form occupies the center of the composition. Large swathes of gold leaf beam from this central shape like a placid, luminous sea. The work depicts two parallel, yet inter-related series of movements: that of the artist’s body and the singular velocity of the materials themselves. Fragmented body parts rendered in pale blue reveal themselves as traces of where Voigt made contact with the paper while slender, salmon-colored tunnels coil in and out of view, charting the movement from one posture to another. Similarly, in the exhibition’s title work, The Real Extent, we see a curve of experience that encompasses traces of movement and the accumulation of time through a series of hills, tunnels, splashes, gold leaf, and rhythmic red hatch marks that radiate from or intersect a central white tori executed in graphite against a rich blue background.