Gerda Scheepers ‘Body Corporate’

Mary Mary is delighted to announce ‘Body Corporate’, a solo exhibition by Gerda Scheepers, her third at the gallery. This new group of works focuses on the idea of an abstract body. A collection of sculptural works, made as a starting point, from generic instant garment closets are installed throughout the space.

Scheepers having re-issued these found objects, their structures both imitated and partially modified, replaces their original covers with ones put together with studio leftovers. In addition some of the joins of the objects’  metal frames have been replaced with a 3d printed copy of these original fixings, producing a graphic, skeletal rendering of a knee-cap.

Titles in her work groups are often borrowed from other structural environments in society. The internal structures inherent to them are imitated or modified in a similar way to how the sculptures are treated, transformed from the original, to support the abstract visual narrative.

References to clothing draw upon the exhibition’s theme of the body. In conjunction Scheepers’ materials imitate physical and psychological gestures or postures like being tired, falling apart, having an expression – almost like material ‘actors’ in a narrative. In this sense there is an idea of a performative whole in the exhibition though all works act both in combination with each other as well as alone.

The physical and psychological spaces around people and the body as address for the tensions that arise from them, informs the tensions and narratives within her work. Forming part of a simultaneously gestural, physical and formally methodized process, Scheepers’ relation to materials and the studio is also very much the foundation of her finalised pieces. These works often show their making and notes for making, with gesture, motif and method merged as one layer.

There is often a shifting of roles amongst her many references such as architecture, television, films, furniture and clothing, referencing within them the everyday. Here she continues this part of her process, by including the mundane objects of a generic everyday (in this instance the lo-fi aesthetic of an instant garment closet) and explicitly referencing ‘a body’ (indeed one work here is a depiction of the digestive system).

Text: Mary Mary Gallery