UPCOMING
Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen
99 – 24

Eröffnung / Opening: November 30, 2024
Exhibition dates / Ausstellungsdaten: December 4, 2024 - February 15, 2025

Press release

After nearly two decades of collaboration, starting from 2005, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen both have been revisiting their trajectories thanks to a four-year group effort with editor Barbara Vanderlinden and the Arocha-Schraenen Studio. This endeavor will soon culminate with the publication of their first comprehensive monographic book published by Mercator and Yale University Press. This book will focus on their lives and work as a duo, but also on their lives and artistic practices before they started working together.

In their upcoming solo exhibition 99 - 24 at Galerie Parisa Kind, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen's paintings have all been made in 2024, however, these works were originally conceived between 1999 and 2000.
Flare (1999-2024) and Zipper (2000-2024) by Carla Arocha are both remakes of her original paintings that could not be traced back. Livingroom, Bedroom, Kitchen, and Bathroom-Kitchen (all dated 1999-2024) from Stéphane Schraenen’s What I Don’t See at Night series (1999), also executed this year by Arocha and Schraenen, are all based on a set of detailed sketches and notes by Stéphane Schraenen for paintings which until now had not been realized.

Zipper (2000-2024) refers to the space between the body and a garment whose purpose is to conceal, protect and, depending on the form it takes, assigns some kind of identity.

Flare (1999-2024) is part of a body of work executed immediately after Carla Arocha moved from Chicago to Antwerp. Flare, which was exhibited in Chicago at the time, implies the magnitude of the relocation. It represents an outline of Carla Arocha’s head and shoulders camouflaged within a pattern in the form of what could be read as an explosion, a burst of light.

The What I Don’t See at Night series (1999 / 2024) are four large scale paintings depicting back-lit views from a night-time room, from the walls with windows of Stéphane Schraenen’s apartment from the late 90’s. Each painting only showing multiple rectangles of murky colors, hinting at Antwerp's city lights reflected on grey skies in the windows and surrounded by utmost darkness.

99-24 (2024) a wall painting edition alluding to a hyphen. A white iridescent hyphen painted directly on the wall symbolizes not only the timespan from conception to execution of all works in this exhibition, but also relates to the collaborative aspect of their practice as an artist duo.

This exhibition both shows their similar conceptual understanding, as well as pictorial affinities. “99-24” Is Carla Arocha’s und Stéphane Schraenen’s second show with Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt/M.