Xenia Fink’s recent drawings at Galerie Schuster Miami, pen-and-ink, and texts, created during her ISCP 2010 Grant (The International Studio & Curatorial Program, a not-for-profit, residency-based contemporary art center for emerging to mid-career artists and curators from around the world) are full of contradictions. Contradictions, personal and familial. Contradictions personal and private. The artist’s tableau scenes are richly styled with the formal elements of figurative drawing, but then we look at the relationships of those figures, and something different bubbles to the surface. When speaking of figure relationships, I speak about the gender, the gesture, and even the texted message the artist applies to the paper’s surface. Those texts reveal as much as it hides the meaning, or interpretation.
One thing we do see between the relationships are a number of things that have the viewer question the same issues in their own lives: family relationships and their negotiation; exposed intimacies, conflicted emotions, resolving the internal issues of coming of age. Underlying each of these beautifully drafted drawings is an uneasiness that forces us to look inward and see how each of us is just as full of the contradictions the Xenia Fink has inked to paper.
