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Leftover Cowhide Becomes Abstract Art in the Hands of Anneliese Schrenk

Animal skins form reinterpretations of drawing, painting, and readymade art in a new pop-up exhibition from the Viennese artist.
Exhibition view. All images courtesy of Circle Culture

Carefully curated animal skins adorn the walls at Viennese conceptual artist Anneliese Schrenk's new show in New York at Berlin-based Circle Culture Gallery’s tiny pop-up space on the Lower East Side. The exhibition, The Space Between, is a continuation of the artist’s exploration into the “phenomenon of skin as the connector and delimiter between all beings, spaces, and things.” Working almost exclusively with defective leather material she knows as “dry cuft”—thick cowhide castoff from the leather manufacturing industry—Schrenk finds beauty in the natural and effected flaws visible in the processed flesh she salvages. Her process echoes the brutality of the industry she gleans her inspiration from; she cuts, stretches, and manipulates the hides using paint, dye, acid, and sandpaper to create works of art as refined and luxurious as the sports car seats and handbags for which the hides weren’t up to snuff.

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Exhibition view

Installed in the front of the gallery are three art-form abstractions: Schrenk’s interpretations in flesh of drawing, painting, and readymade art. Long strips of dark blue and black leather hang taut from nails in the ceiling, centers weighed down by thin metal blocks—linear, like three-dimensional strokes of charcoal in the air.

S2E41, 2013, cut leather, © Circle Culture

A black leather hide is nailed fashionably to the wall, displaying clamp marks, holes, and other defects; its center cut out and draped before it in a large rectangle, like an empty frame or like a blank canvas—the image hanging above it like leather paint dripping up the walls.

Stretched like a canvas and displayed like a painting is Schrenk’s ready-made: a hide destroyed by misplaced glue in the manufacturing process which the artist restored, carefully separating the layers to reveal a ghostly, Rorschach-like pattern imprinted on the skin.

In Schrenk’s work, imperfections and scars become treasured features, characterizing the artworks through the personalization of the skin. Having been earned and experienced by the once-living animal, the hide’s scars and marks inform the artist; she communicates the bearer’s life and death by displaying these altered yet recognizable remains. Blurring the boundaries between painting, installation and sculpture, Schrenk’s malleable medium begs for connective interpretation. Her works may be regarded in many lights simultaneously, having a weight to them which stems not only from physical matter, but from the conceptual depth of how they came to be.

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Exhibition view.

The Space Between will be on view until Sunday, May 17th at 2 Rivington Street, New York, NY.

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