Submission
AUGUST 09, 2023

In the Night Time Bloom

Antonia Nannt and Michael Sandford at Holden Garage, Berlin
July 01 — August 14, 2023

In the Night Time Bloom, Antonia Nannt and Michael Sandford, 2023, Room View

With newly commissioned works from Michael Sandford (*1998, Australia) and Antonia Nannt (*1995, Germany) In the Night Time Bloom places a magnifying lens over the cityscape building façade – the thin but loaded site which clothes the interior in decor. Thus, through the language of design, the contents of the building are intuitable to the outside observer. Yet, simultaneously, caked in surveillance equipment, this membrane keeps watch over the public at large.

Nannt’s steel sculptures dot the walls and floor of the space: she has cultivated a garden of metal flowers whose petals hang heavy on their round faces. Each is emblazoned with the names of design movements welded in script. The words themselves are so numerous on each floret that here and there petals have fallen prematurely – the weight of history and expectation impossible to contain. Inside some sits fragile coloured glass, revealing the thinness of the flowers’ skin, and nothing but emptiness and white walls beyond. Coated in enamel – the functional material of bath tubs and street signs – they sparkle pleasantly. But the blown up shapes and rustic joins are not tritely comforting like the Art Nouveau stucco of a renovated Altbau. And so Nannt sows a seed of doubt about the rightness we instinctively find in these plant effigies, wrought in inorganic matter for human consumption.

Sandford also puts the verity of the images he uses as his source material into question. The artist’s two new chalk drawings on blackboard are recreations of the views from hacked security cameras which watch over desolate industrial landscapes. Blending an illustrative style that is faithful to form, with the powdery material of chalk whose texture spills over the most true line into dusty oblivion, he renders his images with an eerie combination of certainty and doubt. The sinister quality of his source material – surveillance apparatus that silently open in the darkness to observe more fruitfully – is translated through the authoritative schoolroom chalkboards he draws on.

Both Sandford and Nannt are keenly attuned to the plasticity of truth, and the ways in which it is collectively decided upon by those in power through image, architecture, and symbol. By probing the thickness of these external skins, they offer a view from both sides of the façade, recognising that as we look out, we are also, always, looking in.

In the Night Time Bloom, Antonia Nannt and Michael Sandford, 2023, Room View
Michael Sandford, Kadan, 2023 Unfixed chalk, dry pastel, found chalkboard. 180 x 90 x 5 cm
Antonia Nannt, Ralph Lauren Homestead x Laura Ashley Style, 2023 Fused glass on steel. 100x90x20 cm
Antonia Nannt, Ralph Lauren Homestead x Laura Ashley Style, 2023 Fused glass on steel. 100x90x20 cm
Antonia Nannt, Ralph Lauren Homestead x Laura Ashley Style, 2023 Fused glass on steel. 100x90x20 cm
Michael Sandford, NYC, 2023 Unfixed chalk, found chalkboard. 200 x 100 x 5 cm
Antonia Nannt, Beyond Baroque x Disneyfication x DOMINANT FLORAL x Gilded Glamour, 2023 Enamel on stainless steel. 80x80x10 cm
Antonia Nannt, 5 Antonia Nannt McMansion x Hummer House, 2023 Enamel on stainless steel. 80x80x10 cm
Antonia Nannt, DUCK x Decorated Shed, 2023 Enamel on stainless steel. 80x80x10 cm and Kitsch x Eclecticism, 2023 Enamel on stainless steel, enamel on copper, fused glass. 80x80x15 cm
Antonia Nannt, Detail of Kitsch x Eclecticism, 2023 Enamel on stainless steel, enamel on copper, fused glass. 80x80x15 cm

In the Night Time Bloom
Antonia Nannt and Michael Sandford

Holden Garage, Berlin
July 01 — August 14, 2023

Curation: Ella Krivanek

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Holden Garage, Berlin

Antonia Nannt (*1995, DE) lives and works in Berlin. Recreating elements of architectural ornamentation, particularly facades, she redeploys these symbols in homespun forms and industrial materials. Through the unusual combinations of material, arrangement and scale, she draws out the emptiness and uncanniness of these often nature-based motifs, skirting the lines between retaining their decorative qualities and revealing the precariousness of their meaning and use. On the one hand beguiling the viewer to take pleasure in the sparkling glass, or metallic sheen of her steel and enamel sculptures. On the other, questioning how they are used as part of the language of design to forcibly transmit nostalgia, reassurance, or even power itself.

Michael Sandford (*1998, Canberra, AU) is an artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. His practice materialises increasingly hallucinatory conflations of virtual and physical realms, calling into question contemporary boundaries of public space. Confusing time, place and significance, Sandford attempts disorientation in the face of technological omniscience.

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