Featured Project
In March 2020, Nicola Ginzel arrived at the Q21 Art Residency at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. This residency, which hosts international artists and selects one American artist every two months with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, is designed to foster creative exchange through collaboration, networking, and studio visits.
Tell us about your Artist in Residency Program at the Museumsquartier in Vienna which started in March 2020—a bit about the program and about your work in that residency.
Shortly after I arrived, Austria went under lockdown because of Covid. It impacted my residency and proposed collaborative project in extreme ways. Focusing on the same idea that brought me there—transforming the famous Palais Equitable—I began mapping the building’s footprint through the process of frottage by using huge sheets of red carbon paper on my own. This process took four months.
The American Palais, built in 1891 after the original Equitable Life Assurance Society Building in NYC, is riddled with a complex history—both public and private. It curiously protects Vienna’s oldest landmark from the Middle Ages, a nail-tree talisman, which has been considered a symbol for Vienna’s Mythical Center. Felled in 1440, the earliest nails associate this nail-tree with others in former Austria-Hungary. Then, nails were used as a medium to transfer illness into wood for healing. It is this metaphysical aspect that interests me.
The Pollock Krasner grant enabled you to bring almost 80 works through the steady support of a large studio over the past year. Tell us about this body of work, the studio, and how the grant enabled you to fulfill this project.
During my Q21 Residency, I began transforming the frottages with mixed media. Following it, I worked on pieces isolated from each other in unconventional spaces and in spurts. The brief time in a huge basement at the Old American Can Factory in 2022 gave me a glimpse of how necessary it was to work on them together. As the support of a large studio became a reality, the hardest thing was facing how many pieces I needed to destroy in order to open them back up to have a conversation with the rest of the artworks.
Directly preceding the 2023 Pollock Krasner Grant, I received a grant from Café Royal Cultural Foundation. It was the gateway to subletting a former osteopathic clinic through Lee Rehab, where I’d complete the Masa Subseries. The PKF Grant enabled me to continue to transform the other four subseries in the same workspace. They are categorized by paper type and size and laid out like chapters in a book. They include the Shoji, the Silberburg, the Hahnmühle, and finally, the Kitakata Subseries. In hindsight, the work developed beyond what I ever imagined. My year in the studio, supported by a generous grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, was used to its fullest potential.
In her essay, Dr. Agnes Berecz says that your work is “conceptually informed yet thoroughly materially grounded…it moves freely among procedures such as drawing, collage, frottage, painting, construction, and performance.” Can you elaborate on your process with particular focus on frottage?
I use frottage as a way to record identity, whose marks may be seen both graphically and/ or sculpturally upon the paper’s surface. Contained in those frottage lines is the memory of the object or, in this case, the three-dimensional space of the footprint. Frottage is a means for me to gather raw material for the purpose of altering, integrating, and even obscuring the original rubbed marks further through the use of mixed media. In this project, frottage serves the same purpose as the original tree that became the nail-tree talisman long ago. They are both ‘containers’ for transformation. They both become talismans of sorts.
Layering rubbings from the building’s perimeter (consecutively) not only immediately defines them as frottage, a term coined by the surrealist Max Ernst, but creates new possibilities from their intersecting marks. Learning that the traditional use of rubbings dates back thousands of years ago to replicate headstones, or more appropriately, ancient stelae in China, adds another perspective to this project. Then it was a means to preserve genealogy.
In your thorough interview, Tracing the Past, with Jonathan Goodman (Tussle Magazine), you describe How Do You Restructure Form? as a “type of cleansing ritual exorcising a metaphorical patriarchal pathology, whose arcane dogma—regardless of nation, culture, belief, or Age—dissolves into many possibilities.” Can you elaborate on that by taking a close look at one or two pieces in that series?
The Palais Equitable was a status symbol for the most successful insurance company in the US during the late 19th century. For me personally, it was where I’d visit my grandfather on trips to Europe with my dad during my formative years. After my father passed, it was supposed to become my inheritance.
As an artist, I approach things often like a shaman. The easiest way to understand the work is by observing how the red frottage mark changes, especially within the various subseries. It may be chromatically concealed by paint, accentuated with ink, iodine, loose pigment, pastel, colored pencil, and even stitched over with thread or wool. This Masa piece, above, was the first to be cut and then reassembled at its mid-section. I work on both sides of the paper. That in itself is like a dialog as one side responds to the other’s bleeds and stitches.
‘How Do You Restructure Form? Nos. 6, 53, 91’ is one the most complex of 18 Silberburg pieces. The more complex the works become, the farther they move away from the recognizable elements of a building. And purposefully so, in order to emphasize the Mythical Center of Vienna.
How do you see this body of work in the larger context of your work—past and near future?
The last two subseries, the Hahnemühle and the Kitakata continue to unravel ‘How Do You Restructure Form?’ I stitched over a good amount of the Hahnemühle’s original frottage marks with blue cotton thread in every piece except one. Most original backs are now fronts as the stitch brings the original frottage mark into 3-D.
I experimented with a process I had been doing for over ten years. Prior to this project, I stitched everyday ephemera, which could be used as a textured template for frottage. Here, a separate stitched piece was placed under the existing and manipulated red carbon frottage. It was rubbed with loose blue pigment and a damp towel. The detail captures the quality of the blue lines as they dominate the traces of red frottage and mixed media in the background. The last series, the Kitakata, has opened this project up to another phase, especially after I used blank paper for the first time. Rubbing the transformed stitched frottage marks that originate from the building creates a new ‘blue print,’ so to speak. Like new building plans, it empowers me to reshape the future from the past. It can create a new footprint.
All images are courtesy of the artist.
About the artist: Austrian-American mixed media and installation artist, Nicola Ginzel, works in frottage and object transformation. Growing up in the south as a first generation American of two World War II survivors—a Viennese father who had four nationalities throughout his lifetime, and a German Jewish mother who was baptized Catholic as Hitler was gaining power—Nicola was forced to confront their identity and trauma. Quoted from his 2018 article ‘An Artist who Turns Detritus into Talismans,’ in Hyperallergic, John Yau writes: Ginzel’s interest in transformation and the inherent healing power of certain materials connects her to artists as disparate as Yves Klein and James Lee Byars. I can associate what she does with a wide range of very other artists — from Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz to Joseph Cornell, Philip Hanson and Antonin Artaud to Outsider artists — but in the end they all fall away. Her use of sewing to draw, write, and stitch defines a territory that is all her own.