Outset Estonia supported the production of Katja Novitskova’s first major institutional exhibition and outdoor commission Earth Potential at Lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park in New York. The exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator Emma Enderby.
Earth Potential transforms the City Hall Park into a surreal landscape with a new series of seven large, flat cut aluminium sculptures. Featuring online-sourced, digitally-printed imagery, the works layer alien-like, yet terrestrial animals and organisms over celestial bodies and planets. By creating images at once scientific and poetic, these dramatic, visual objects expose worlds unseen by the naked eye yet indispensable to human advancement. Earth Potential expands Novitskova’s ongoing investigation into today’s media-saturated culture and continues her interest in the relationship between technology, scientific research, and the physical world. The large cut-out sculptures, six to eight feet in diameter, consist of images of the Earth and other planets sourced from the Internet that are composites of various datasets produced via satellite imaging. In several works, a second layer is then affixed, depicting enlarged other-worldly animals and organisms that are used in biotechnology and genetic research.
Born in 1984, in Tallinn, Estonia, Katja Novitskova now lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. In 2017, she is representing Estonia at the Venice Biennale, and recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg (2016); Kunsthalle Lisbon (2015); Mottahedan Projects, Dubai (2014), and CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (2016); Okayama Art Summit, Okayama, Japan (2016); Bremen Art Prize, Kunsthalle Bremen (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016); De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, Netherlands (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); Le Museé d’art contemporain de Lyon (2015); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2014); and Fridericianum, Kassel (2013).
Earth Potential is on view at City Hall Park, Lower Manhattan, from June 22 to November 9, 2017.
