curated by Kerstin von Gabain Event

AMYGDALA

Curated by

Kerstin von Gabain
The gallery festival with international curators in Vienna

with works by
Edin Zenun

“When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. … I must be scientific.” Philip K. Dick*

Amygdala shows an encounter between Edin Zenun’s clay with pigment and oil paintings and botanical models from the early 20th century. Based on his earlier works, the exhibition explores Zenun’s ongoing examination with the space between abstraction and figuration - that interface between the retina and the brain where the individual parts are transformed into a whole. Zenun’s abstract compositions are brittle and simple, restrained yet carefully constructed. The colors are handmade and subdued, yet expressly precise and immediate. Conceived as a series, the paintings are similar as a whole, but differ in detail, and so each composition explains the next. The special, almost fragile-looking, self-made frames complete the paintings. The special nature of the frames is also reflected in the sculptures the artist conceived for the exhibition, which also function as pedestals on which the botanical models are presented in the exhibition.

Referring to medical-anatomical models, Robert Brendel founded a manufacture for botanical models in the middle of the 19th century in Breslau, which was later continued in Berlin until the 1930s. The stylized, oversized and hand-painted models, which were mostly made of paper-mâché and wood, were sold to teaching institutions throughout Europe, but went out of fashion as micro-photography developed. The mechanistic view of the plant world was replaced by a cell biological and hydrodynamic view. Due to their high magnification, dismantleability, and magnificent painting, the models have an abstract and at the same time handmade quality, which in turn ties in with Zenun’s work, who had been occupied with botanical subjects since his student days. The exhibits on display - Edin Zenun’s works and the botanical models - all approach nature with simplifications, but with a divergent view and different aims in each case.

The title is the eponym for one of the exhibited paintings and refers to the almond-shaped group of neurons that are located deep in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. They play a key role in the processing of emotions and are part of the limbic system. The name of the amygdala is explained by its almond-shaped appearance and comes from ancient Greek (μυγδάλη, almond(kernel).

*The Man in the High Castle is a dystopian science fiction novel in interlaced form, written by the author Philip K. Dick. Among other things it deals with the influence of appearance on reality. The fictional antique dealer Robert Childan discovers that many of his antiques are fakes. In view of this, another protagonist, Mr. Tagomi, concludes in the novel that only the historical connotation of the objects is of value, but that this connotation cannot be verified as such.