Christine König Galerie curated by Sophie O’Brien
„[everything becomes mysterious]“

Sophie O’Brien is Senior Exhibitions Curator at the Serpentine Gallery, and whilst there has worked on exhibitions with Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Schütte, Klara Lidén, Wolfgang Tillmans, Luke Fowler, and Gustav Metzger, as well as on architectural projects with SANAA, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, and Ai Weiwei. She is currently working on the annual Serpentine Pavilion commission with Sou Fujimoto and a site-specific exhibition at the new Serpentine Sackler Galleries with Adrián Villar Rojas. She previously worked as Curator for Contemporary and British Art at Tate Britain. Prior to this, she was Co-curator and Exhibitions Manager for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Head of Exhibitions at the Sydney Biennale, Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at Artspace Sydney, and she curated an Australian annual festival of international contemporary art from 1999 to 2001.

A fictive space, a complex legacy, a participatory field, a thing we collude in dreaming up, willingly suspending our disbelief. [It exists not on a surface, but on a plane that is imagined...] As the archetype of art, [A painter doesn’t paint a quince, he paints all quinces], it has re-invented itself and been re-invented by others innumerable times. [Painting exceeds its frame.] A production of signs different to other mediums, swimming in a historical sea. [I paint because I am a country girl. Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint.] The designator of market values and authenticity, [The good son.] its self-reflection creates a dissatisfaction with itself that propels it forward. [In the good old days, painting was an art…] It is distinctly conflicted. [A constellation of problems.] [Not Paradise.] Re-mediatization - where the aspects of one medium are addressed by another - has kept it open and alive. [It is a mirror, mirroring change.] Overtly, it is no longer medium-specific. [Painting is a philosophical enterprise that doesn’t always involve painting.] The un-nameable meeting the structural, a ghost of presence manifested through the handwriting of the author. [The act and the eye.] A face, a subjectivity, brings forth a monologue/dialogue with the viewing eye, holding concretely a private, imaginary space. [A labyrinth of labyrinths.] In honouring the alchemy of painting, we might paint or we might not. [Dorothy Porter, Philip Guston, Marlene Dumas, Mark Leckey, Pliny the Elder, Theodor W. Adorno, Gerhard Richter, Isabelle Graw, Jorge Luis Borges and others].