Madeleine Boschan (born 1979) is a German artist.
Madeleine Boschan studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig from 2000 to 2006, where she was taught by John Armleder.
Since 2010 she has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions throughout Europe and North America focusing on: artistic strategies dealing with preconditioned role-models and relationships of people and architecture,[1] as well as new tendencies of Abstract art,[2] contemporary art from Berlin or Germany,[3] and the interdisciplinary impact of the cabinet of curiosities on contemporary thinking, science and exhibition practice.[4]
Starting in 2008, Madeleine Boschan built her sculptures from found material. These first objets trouvés were modified, reassembled and brought into relation with each other by colour interventions.[5] The different components lost their common value of utilization. With their machine-like appearance these sculptures seem to suggest expedience, still, they inhere in a kind of defunctionalised dissociation – as do indigenous fetishes or desolate and disused apparatus.[6]
From her extensive occupation with Samuel Beckett's TV-pieces, such as "Quod I" and "Quod II", which he realized in 1981 for the German SDR, and his late "closed space stories" as "Worstward Ho" (1983) Madeleine Boschan has derived genuine poetics of space: Space 'itself' is empty and incomprehensible. It is for a body to appear within this void to designate it as a place, to grant contour, form, and shape to it, to constitute it as 'surrounding space'. According to Beckett, Boschan emphasises that spatial experience is first and foremost a physical experience: how does a body gain its halt and stand within the void, how does it find its appropriate place and holds up this position, how does it interact with other bodies?[7]
In 2013 and 2014, she revised and reconsidered her primary pictorial vocabulary: standing, reclining, towering, tilting, arching as well as expansion, contraction, colour, form, measure, and positioning. For in a prudently arranged turn and, particularly, in contrast to the gestalt-like linearity of her prior works, she addresses herself to purely planar bodies; situated residing freely throughout the given space in utterly different phenomenal states; each for itself, yet, constantly in relation to each other.[8] Furthermore, Madeleine Boschan has inseparably incorporated "Technicolor's" base colours (red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, + black and white) into her forms. Colour is, thus, not just appended or appliquéd to her sculptures; rather, the specific chromaticity, being an immediate part of the sculptural operation, originates its very own specific forms.[8]
In the years following, a most elementary question, Roland Barthes' final enquiry constituted the basis of her practice: "How to live together?" As she herself stated: "The earlier sculptures were linear, for sure, intrinsic and averted, withdrawn from us. And after some years, I simply longed to make them more planar, to give them more surface, realign them towards the surrounding space and relate them closer to us. If you like as a broadside at the beholder. And honestly, to me they are still all the same. Not visually, of course, but they all pose the same existential question of spatial corporality, of how a body gains its own stand, finds its appropriate place and holds up this position."[9]
After 2016, "pieces dwelling on the concept of 'spaces within space' and, at the same time, of passage or transition"[9] emerge, "fictive and functionless artefacts" which "retain the utopian ideas that are contained in the architectural strategies she references":[10] Brazilian Tropicália, Jorge Ben, Astrud Gilberto, and Oscar Niemeyer, or James Cameron's cinematic use of the L.A. River-bed, Blade Runner's electric billboards, the topic of a ruinous antiquity, and the pastel colours of 1980's Miami.[9]
In 2018 and 2019, Madeleine Boschan boldly turned the negative void space of the open passages and walk-through situations of her previous portals into positive shapes or entities. The beholders are confronted with a new corporeality. Accordingly, the surrounding walls and spaces associate themselves with these planar objects, conveying both their given objecthood as well as their potential pictorialness.
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