The Future of Nostalgia: Christina Niederberger

Union Gallery is pleased to present Christina Niederberger’s The Future of Nostalgia, curated by William Gustafsson.

The Future of Nostalgia bares its name from Svetlana Boym’s 2001 book which examines the notion of nostalgia by distinguishing between “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgia. Whilst “reflective” nostalgia emphasizes the act of longing itself, accepting the irrevocability of the past and embraces the ambivalences and contradictions of modernity, “restorative” nostalgia attempts to rebuild the lost past as an absolute truth and national collective identity which erases all ambiguity.

This exhibition brings together a body of work by Niederberger dating from 2016 to the present, presenting paintings for which she has reappropriated modern masters via an illusionistic mark marking process, in the case of the works included, Willem de Kooning and Anni Albers. Niederberger's examination of these artists is not driven by a nostalgic desire to reconstruct the past but by a strategy to employ their tropes and styles to reflect on the contributions painting can offer today.

Perceptions of art and it’s past are forever changing. They are never fixed, with the ebbs and flows of cultural conditions, the not withstanding of historical tradition and gender politics. Niederberger examines how a renewed consideration of these contextual elements offers possibilities for a unique contemporary painting practice. Niederberger is interested in the tension generated by the historical rhetoric surrounding the masculine connotations of oil painting creating the illusion of a feminine craft of embroidery in oil, finding it empowering to challenge these ideologies.

It was an intuitive choice for Niederberger to begin this distinctively new body of work in 2016 with de Kooning, specifically his women paintings. A macho male painter with a misogynous, monstrous, untamed nature. Niederberger’s works are a perversion of de Kooning’s painting process, stifling his brush strokes by visually translating them with a tight painstakingly and a meticulously controlled result. She suffocates his bold brush strokes against the grain of his ideology and was not afraid to bastardize his work.

With this exhibition we see Niederberger’s progression of this new direction of her painting practice. Feeling limited by the figurative works, she moved into a more abstract direction allowing her more freedom to scrutinize this evolving exploration of a new style. Still referencing de Kooning with the abstract works, Niederberger felt the translation and interpretations were becoming progressively more her own. The range of tones and colours became systemically more intense and the weave distinctively further intricate.

Finally we look to Anni Albers, a champion of modernism, a woman who elevated the medium of textile to it now being regarding as high art. The prospect of visually translating Albers’ work, as she previously had done with de Kooning’s, was too much for Niederberger, with her holding Albers’ work in too high esteem as one female artist to another. Inspired by Albers but no longer reappropriating a particular original the transformation or influence has taken here its most extreme advancement with Niederberger’s artistic voice speaking the loudest.

Whilst carrying the legacy of modern masters Niederberger has created a renewed contemporary narrative for the nostalgia she holds for past greats of art history.

Niederberger lives and works in London, UK