Opening | June 18th 2021 | 6 pm

A plus A Gallery presents Doppel an Exhibition by Beth Collar and Jesse Darling. The two UK artists who are currently living in Berlin are presenting in Venice a series of new drawings confronting the finite biological reality and the fragility of the human body. At the same time questions arise about relationship and language.

Sexuality and mortality, sensitivity and pain, religion, myth and mystery and their intrinsic incommunicability appear in the realm of the current data and image economy as something we have to undergo collectively, but also to encounter with your own body and your own mind. Both artists committed themselves in the last months to a collaborative process in order to produce new work for their audiences.

Beth Collars drawings with lithographic crayon trace and reveal the inside of your body. In her new series “Hip mobility drawings” the interior that is constituting you is also questioning you. The hip bones as a head, the hip bones as a demon, as if another entity within your own body has its own rules, its own plans and its own gaze entirely, become a free artistic play with inner anatomical forms. Other works on show are inspired by catholic rituals. Two larger mysterious drawings depict a Troccola, a southern Italian liturgical and musical instrument. It is used during Easter when bell ringing is forbidden and is rung or shaken directly at sculptures or pictures depicting Jesus lying dead in the tomb. Collar presents among these works a drawing called “re-read” depicting the trunk of a beech tree which are often used to carve messages to no one and everyone, with words that visitors may or may not decipher in different ways and languages. Finally, some two-sided double drawings with the title “You’re perfect, yes, it’s true, but without me you’re only you” show sprigs of mistletoe and drawn on the reverse black-death era activities like self-flagellation and bird-like masks of the plague in the Middle Ages.

Jesse Darlings drawings are examining libidinal economies as seen from the social perspective of the metropolis but also from a very personal viewpoint and from the viewpoint of nature, and remnants of biblical, art historical and mythical narratives. In some of the drawings Ariadne seems to be intertwined with the capitalistic product placement of Red Bulls, while a “Self-portrait at 40” refers not only in its title to Dante’s Divina Commedia and its selva oscura. In another work, thumbs and hands are melting into flaccidity or erect like dicks in front of a city skyline. This line-up of houses, homes and trees on the horizon, is partly pixilated as if to reveal that the spectrum of sexuality is as individual as it is social, digitalized and natural at the same time. Another colourful drawing entitled “Big Voice (libidinal economies 1)” shows a crouching figure with their head in their hands that experiences an explosion in their ears and at their crotch while a gigantic shoe, shaped like a factory with a chimney at the heel, stomps down on earth from the sky. All this new works are drawn with a subtle and delicate but very firm line. This delicacy, quietness and sincerity in Darlings work grows more and more powerful the more often you look at them. Extraordinary also the larger drawing “Eden”, best described in the small poetry inscribed underneath it “I tell you what, let’s us play Eden. I can be Adam. You can be Eve. No — you be the garden.”

Jesse Darling’s recent projects include: Gravity Road, solo show at the Kunstverein Freiburg (2020); Prize of the Böttcherstrasse, Kunsthalle Bremen (2020); Haunted Haus, Swiss Institute, New York, (2020); Studio Berlin, Boros Foundation, Berlin (2020); Selva Oscura solo show at Galerie Sultana, Paris (2019); 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, Venice (2019); Transcorporealities, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019); Crevé, solo show at Triangle France, Astérides, Marseille (2019); The Ballade of Saint Jerome, Art Now, solo show at Tate Britain, London (2018); A Cris Ouverts, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes (2018); Support Level, Chapter Gallery, New York (2018)

Beth Collar is an artist working predominantly in performance and sculpture and in the shared ground between them. She was recipient of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2016/17. Her work has been shown at KW, Berlin, The Serpentine Gallery, London, Cell Project Space, London among others. Beth Collar’s recent projects include: Basher Dowsing solo show, von ammon co, Washington DC (2021), a performance for Why Words Now at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Art Hub Copenhagen, Denmark (2021), Scatter Cushion, audio work for Pogo Bar podcasts, KW, Berlin (2021), “End Quote”, solo show, stadium, Berlin (2020), Daddy Issues, solo show, a Matt’s Gallery commission at Dilston Grove, London (2019), Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking, solo show, Matt’s Gallery, London (2019) Cloaked Output Vol 2: Spirals of Focus, solo show, Primary, Nottingham, (2018), Seriously, solo show for the Mark tanner Sculpture Award, Standpoint, London (2017).