Exhibition | Anna-Bella Papp's Minimalist Clay | CFile

A relative newcomer, 25-year-old Romanian artist Anna-Bella Papp has been making an impression with her first two solo shows last year. Papp, who now lives and works in Rome, is a 2013 graduate of De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Here works are unfired clay pieces, slab-like works that are minimal and modern while evoking a sense of ancient writing.

In reviewing Papp’s first exhibition at Stuart Shave Modern Art Gallery in London in 2013, critic Amy Sherlock suggested the unfired clay works are part of a cryptic alphabet. The works are both ephemeral and complete, the pliability of the raw clay undercut as the work dries and becomes brittle and, since many are too heavy to hang on a wall, they can be observed in three dimensions. The critic forgives you if you mistakenly assume this is someone’s venture into experimental architecture.

” On closer inspection, it became clear that these pieces are not models, or sketches, or prototypes for anything larger, but rather their own perfectly formed units, complete unto themselves.

“As well as the process of working systematically, systems themselves seem to be important to Papp. Some of the forms, such as the clusters of three claw-mark-like scratches in one of the show’s only titled works, this verse has no other night than the one that is coming, recall much older forms of making marks in clay – runes, or maybe hieroglyphs. Their symbolic functions emphasized by the fact that the rectangular slabs, or tablets, approximate the dimensions of a sheet of A4 paper. And the individual tablets themselves follow a similar logographic logic. Each is a defined character in a cryptic alphabet, which can be endlessly recomposed across surfaces in new configurations.”

Papp had more good press in Ginny Kollak’s review of the Independent art fair in New York. Stuart Shave devoted its booth to Papp’s work, which Kollak described as “stunning.”

“Papp makes smooth, spare reliefs in unfired clay- some with Fontana-like slashes, others with esoteric, geometric shapes, and still more with figurative elements (including a stylized cat clutching a wine bottle,” Kollak writes.

We at CFile can’t wait to see what else this young artist can turn out in the future.

Above image: Anna-Bella Papp, exhibition detail, Independent, New York, March 2013.

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