Scale: 1:2.5

Irene Kopelman

27 Eyl 2008
25 Eki 2008

outLINE starts the new arts season with the second episode of 'Crossroads', the guest curator selection. Curator Eva Fotiadi puts on show the installation Scale: 1: 2.5 by Irene Kopelman.

Irene Kopelman (Argentina, 1974) explores in her work systems of representation, their methodologies, and possible transfers between them. Her interest is mostly focused on modern systems, their logic and techniques, before the digital age. One strand of her work takes as departure point scientific systems as found, for example, in natural history collections, with their methods of categorization, archiving, documentation and visual representation.

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Sketch of Scale 1:2.5 by Irene Kopelman, image taken from Outline website -

The installation ‘Scale 1:2.5’ is made in situ at outLINE. In the empty white cube of the gallery Kopelman has taken as starting point the texture of the walls’ surface, dealing with the exhibition space as a potential landscape. She has mapped out the walls in an architectural grid and reproduced the entire surface scale 1:1 using the technique of frottage. On the frottages the architectural surfaces come out as images that resemble landscapes seen from the sky. Rubbing over the walls and tracing every single tiny detail of its texture, the white emptiness is suddenly turned to an intense and crowded image that invites the eye to explore differences and repetitions in its complex patterns. Kopelman has subsequently photographed square by square the entire grid of the frottages, this time scale 1:2.5 and then returned the new photographic images back in visual and conceptual encounter with the original places at the gallery walls.

Thus the entire visual representation is brought back to its original architectural and physical space. For all the precision and objectivity of the reproduction techniques [the grid, the frottage, the photography] the successive transfers give birth to images that evoke complex subjective associations. Associations that move between perceptions, categories and representation methods of architecture and landscape, emptiness and fullness, space and matter, the concrete and the abstract, the tactile and the visual.



Opening on Saturday 27th of September 17.00 - 19.00 hrs
With an introduction by Rachel Esner, Ass. Prof. in Art History at the University of Amsterdam

The exhibition runs from 27 September until 25 Cctober, 2008 and can be visited from Thu-Sun 13:00-17:00.