When Germaine Kruip came across the work of Laura Grisi in early 2022, she was struck by the affinities between their respective artistic practices. They were born a generation apart – Grisi in Greece in 1939 and Kruip in the Netherlands in 1970 – and never met; the oldest artist had died in 2017. But they shared so many concerns: time, space and perception; nature and geometry; culture and spirituality. Both artists have channeled these interests into objects and installations made using a range of environmental and technological materials, including (but not limited to) wind, rain, air, film , photography, neon and sound live and recorded. Aesthetically, their approaches are also synchronized: both minimal, even austere, but also playful and theatrical. Chez Grisi air volume, 1968, for example, was an empty white room, about 117 cubic inches, lit by strips of neon tubes. Kruip’s subtle interventions in museums and galleries often featured slowly rotating lamps and mirrored panels, resulting in a continuous interplay of light and shadow.
For this exhibition, “The Mirrored”, Kruip has placed five of his own pieces alongside four by Grisi. The installation has been meticulously arranged to emphasize formal and conceptual echoes. On opposite walls in the main space, for example, were two rectangular projections: Grisi’s film Wind speed 40 knots1968, in which she measured and documented the effects of high winds in different geographic regions, and Kruip’s The illuminated wind, Udone-shima, 2023, essentially a blank, white “screen” of light. The brightness of the work varied according to data collected in real time from an anemometer located on a desert volcanic island about ninety-three miles south of Tokyo. Weather theme extension was Kruip’s A Cloud of Shadow, at the still point of the turning world, 2005–, consisting of slides of found photographs of a cloud silhouetted against a mountainous landscape, with a projector clicking into a corner of the room. On another wall, on either side of the front door, Kruip paired a 1977 work on paper by Grisi titled The imaginary dimensions (The Imaginary Dimensions), which uses a hexagon to explore the artist’s hypothesis of the multiplication of forms in four-dimensional space, with its own Six-Part Kannadi Hexagon2023. The kannadis is a metal alloy (traditionally circular) mirror handcrafted by artisans in the small town of Aranmula in Kerala, India. Kruip specially commissioned these unusually shaped specimens to generate a dialogue with Grisi’s work.
Can a real dialogue take place when one of the interlocutors is no longer alive? In the center of the exhibition, a few meters from the neon sculpture of Grisi spiral light1968—Kruip suspended 360 Polyphony, Brass, 2023, three slender brass beams made by Bremen, Germany-based instrument maker Thein Brass. Visitors could hit the beams with a beater, causing them to emit sounds that mixed and reverberated for minutes. The competition of several tones or melodies has been presented here as a metaphor for the coming and going of the artistic voices of Kruip and Grisi. But it seems to me that Kruip’s sensitive installation felt more like a musical remix than a conversation, sampling, combining and rearranging existing works. This was particularly evident in the second room of the show, where The measurement of time1969, a silent film showing Grisi sitting in a desert and counting grains of sand, acquired a soundtrack thanks to its neighbor, Kruip’s Loop Film A square without corners, 2020. As I watched Grisi undertake his endless task, I listened to a Balinese high priestess recite quotes about the universe and infinity from sources such as Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein and Kazimir Malevich. (The reading was in a mixture of languages; the only visual component of the film is an English translation of the quoted passages.) By this time, the distinctions between one work of art and another were entirely – albeit temporarily – dissolved.
