MAJLA ZENELI, untitled (Here, where light is.), 2022, mezzotint print, 10,4 x 8,4 cm
Diffuse blurs, geometric-abstract forms and complex collages - Majla Zeneli always uses the almost forgotten mezzotint printing technique to masterfully create touching visual worlds that allow us as viewers to immerse ourselves, linger and think ahead. In the interplay of patterns, layers and variables, the artist focuses on the light in her latest works. Contrasts of light and dark, black and white in all their facets and mergers up to text passages and letters lead into a multi-layered meditation on emptiness, the hidden, origins and eternities.
Like non-representational night pieces, the fine, small-format prints with their intense contrasts of light and dark convey a haunting spatial quality. The absence of any dimension gives the viewer complete freedom of projection and association, whether with dimly lit rooms, cracks and protrusions, moons or entire galaxies. The deep black as a representative of absolute darkness, whose emptiness also holds the potential for everything and is able to hide infinite depths within itself, is the achromatic color of the beginning and the end of our world. Majla Zeneli contrasts this darkness with a broad spectrum ranging from gray to white: This is where light is present, the existential force, the impulse for all life as well as the prerequisite for the visual perception of every detail, no matter how small. Especially with the semi-darkness, the transitions and intermediate stages, shadows and twilight, the artist awakens the awareness of the existence of things and the longing for more light in order to be able to recognize and comprehend better.
Majla Zeneli also takes up the process of perception in a multi-layered play with linguistic means: The artist interweaves typographic elements and text passages on the subject of light with her abstract images to the point of almost illegibility, creating camouflage-like patterns and placing passages from works by the German-American poet Rosemary Waldrop in an intermedial dialog with her own image prints. Playing with the pictorial quality of letters, light is the focus of a variety of perspectives, which only become partially visible and legible through its own physical existence.
On the thresholds between light and dark, Majla Zeneli lets us stagger between clarity and uncertainty, imagination and reality. With Half Light, she leads us into depths of content and creates atmospherically charged images full of beauty, which can inspire reflection on the composition of our world as well as provide comfort.
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Majla Zeneli was born in Tirana (Albania) in 1980 and lives in Berlin. She studied graphic art at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art in Wroclaw until 2006 and with Prof. Thomas Rug at the Burg Giebichenstein Academy of Art in Halle until 2008. Her artistic works have been presented internationally in numerous exhibitions, at art fairs, in museums and at graphic art biennials. In 2022, Majla Zeneli received the five-yearly Christine Perthen Prize for Etching from the Berlinische Galerie - Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur. The museum also acquired works for its own collection. The following year, Majla Zeneli was awarded the Honorary Prize for Small Format Printmaking by the Municipal Gallery in Łódź (Poland). Just recently, she won the 2nd prize of the 20th International Graphic Triennial in Frechen.
Opening: Sat, July 6, 2024, 4–8 pm