Monika Bravo

Johannes Vogt is pleased to present "Tesserae", the first solo show with the gallery by Colombian artist Monika Bravo. The exhibition features an immersive, room-spanning installation of animated videos presented on multiple monitors as well as projected onto the walls. This new body of work represents Bravo's continued engagement with an advancement of the realm of digital animation and site-specific installation.

Curator's Statement:

Arising from her ongoing research on color and rhythm, Monika Bravo’s new works place us in an abyss pulsing with vibrating waves of energy, where readability and meaning remain elusive. After Bergson’s understanding of time and his concept of duration–which differentiates between the time that we measure in intervals and the time of our experience–Bravo aims for an interconnected sense of unity between space and time through an understanding of our mind´s cognitive structure, which gives to formless reality both shape and meaning. Thus, the visual layers and cycles that dwell between those states of abstraction and their corresponding materiality are what Bravo´s work reveals to us and what we are supposed to experience through it.

Throughout her new installation, in the form of a mosaic of ideas, Bravo shows the gathering and editing of images through stitching, weaving, and compositing. Bravo also uses color to create a material contrast, a physical experience grounded in the circular duration of time in the piece. In the center of five monitors, three projectors, and sound, the viewer undergoes a hyper-rhythmic sensorial stimulation. In this activated state, on the one hand, Bravo is superimposing layers on LCD screens to help us enter into a new cognizance, where perception is mediated between what is real and what is virtual. On the other hand, a set of projections will be countering that experience: bursts of patterns of tiles, masked with Google Earth image captures, will pulsate around the room as the silent beat of an imaginary musical score.

For Bravo, the skin–our skin–is what translates these sensorial forms. For her, the body is the site where form and content develop an exchange, a dialogue, and where a balance between them is struck. Following this conceptual frame, the one who knows and understands the surface is the one who can experience the depths and the void. As Paul Valéry used to say, “the skin is the deepest thing there is.” But, at the same time, inspired by the mechanical and hallucinatory vision of a possible future where robots would see the world as a pixelated blur, Bravo uses technology to assemble a composite of pieces and particles–an animated puzzle of multiple and cracked realities–that allows the viewer to descend into a place where other possibilities–parallel realities and discoveries–exist.

As of recent Bravo has been incorporating the history and tradition of mosaics into her practice. After working many years with animation, projection, and installation, Bravo is now oscillating between ancient and contemporary technologies, between the eternal image on a wall and the fleeting projection on the screen, where a conversation of particles emerges between tesserae and pixels. Bravo is thus rewriting a new code between the two languages of weaving and mosaic-making, a code that connects the elements of perception, illusion, time, technology, and the universal.

Recently granted a commission by the MTA Arts & Design, Bravo has also begun to work with mosaics. After working many years with animations, projections, and installations, Bravo is now oscillating between ancient and contemporary technologies, between the eternal image on a wall and the fleeting projection on the screen, where a conversation of particles emerges between tesserae and pixels. Bravo is thus rewriting a new code between the two languages of weaving and mosaic-making, a code that connects together the elements of perception, illusion, time, technology, and the universal.

-Octavio Zaya

Monika Bravo is a multi-disciplinary artist and was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1964. She studied fashion design in Rome and Paris as well as photography in London and New York. She has been living in New York since 1994. Bravo has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2015. She has exhibited at numerous art and cultural institutions including the Sternesen Museum in Oslo, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, Site Santa Fe and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, with video screenings at MOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, Museo di Arte Contemporaneo in Rome, MOCA in Los Angeles and the Tate Britain. Recent exhibitions of Bravo’s work have been held at the 60 Wall Gallery of Deutsche Bank in New York, Von Bartha Gallery in Basel, Switzerland and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. Also, Bravo has recently been commissioned for a project with MTA Arts & Design.

The artist would like to thank the lovely staff at Franz Mayer of Munich as well as Cristina Bedoya, Juan Carlos Ortiz, Nechama Winston, Ercole Home and Octavio Zaya for their invaluable contributions to the show.