Critic’s Guide to the Best Shows in Lisbon
Referencing the moody atmospheres of 19th century German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who sublimed his landscapes with the spirit of God, Mariele Neudecker exalts slices of the natural world through mise en scène. In her installations, videos and photography God’s presence, however, may have been replaced by that of technology and scientific observation. The earliest work on show from 2000, Another Day (Simultaneous Record of the Sun Rising and Setting in Two Opposite Locations On The Globe – South East Australia and West Azores), is a two-channel video of a sunrise and a sunset that creates a wonderful postcard-like ecliptic anomaly, rich in twilight colours. In the back room of the gallery Neudecker has erected three fibreglass tree trunks, Faintly Falling Upon All the Living and the Dead (2009), as well as a small 3D tank piece, The Touch of Earthly Years (2018), that mystically captures a section of a forest. Neudecker made trips to Greenland in 2012 and 2015, where she saw glaciers in real life for the first time and here a human-size fibreglass example, There is Always Something More Important (2012) reminds the viewer of her journey to these natural wonders. While flirting with clichéd images, Neudecker’s pieces also carry a certain scientific detachment that takes large portions of the romantic out of the sublime but also helps us consider nature for the impact humans have on it.
- Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva