START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

The graduate work by Wanda Nay is composed of a set of disparate works, characterized in general by abstract forms and the traditional media of painting and sculpture, however, she works with them in a very unconventional way. The first part is represented by sculptures which were site-specific, created for the actual space of her graduate exhibition. They were created by stacking up the exhibition pedestals and display cases and filling up the holes with coloured modeling clay which created a kind of expressive “painting” on a monochromatic and geometric surface. Another part of the set were under-paintings on glass plates placed at various places in the installation. With spray, acrylic, engraving and other methods, she created abstract paintings, records of a spontaneous painting process the appearance of which only revealed itself after she finally turned the glass plate. Then she presented two prints in a similar style to the strict geometry of the Concretists, the post-war art movement connected with Switzerland and figures like Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, however, she concieved the prints in a slightly ironic vein while at the same time as a truly contemporary interpretation because the principle of the print is a “painting with a marker”, later scanned and printed on a large scale. (mf)