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YHBHS Interview
with
Eva Berendes, Pt 1.

"folding screens & paravents"

Paravents: noun,

A wind-screen; a shelter from wind.

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"Questions of construction and design collapse into one which is also mirrored by the fact that the back side of the works is usually exposed.


In fact, that is probably the reason for some works having turned into sculpture,
I simply did not want to neglect their back side."




- Eva Berendes


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YHBHS: Eva, thank you for taking the time to answer some questions regarding your work. I’m transfixed by your “screens.” The manner in which the colors and the forms interact. Can you tell me more about how & why they originated?

Eva Berendes: There are various works that you could call screens but I suppose you are addressing the folding screens or "paravents“, 4- or 5- part hinged wooden frames filled with compositions of color fields made from suspended, kind of "woven“ cotton thread. Those fields change a lot in transparency/opacity when you move around them (beside the strong moiree effect) and that makes them very elusive, a quality that made the actual making of them in the studio rather tedious.










I found it hard to find a technique that would render a similar kind of effect to help deciding about the colours by means of a model or a sketch. But to come back to your question, the screens are connected to a number of earlier works of mine, the earliest of them perhaps being a large tie-dye curtain that I did for my MA show in London in 2002.

I had made a couple of paintings with tie-dyed fabric on a strecther and had collaged other, more geometric elements onto them. All of it was part of my experiments with various ways of referencing historical work, back then it was the Russian avant-garde. I was aiming at a peaceful reconciliation of contradictory visual elements and eventually I decided to treat the elements more like two different individuals when I brought them together in one space rather than on a stretcher. Which means that in one way you can relate most of my works back to the matrix of stretcher and canvas. In the screens I am dealing with both these components, a wooden frame and cotton, but have lead them into a more symbiotic relationship.

Questions of construction and design collapse into one which is also mirrored by the fact that the back side of the works is usually exposed. In fact, that is probably the reason for some works having turned into sculpture, I simply did not want to neglect their back side. And then all this is met by strong interest in material culture, craft, the Applied Arts and the beginning of abstract Art.



Or else, perhaps this is just another angle of looking at the same thing.






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YHBHS Interview with
Eva Berendes, Pt 1


.
"folding screens, paravents"





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