Johanna Odersky

Crea-Up

German artist Johanna Odersky’s work interrogates how repetition is used to track the passing of time. Multidisciplinary in her approach, Odersky is an active figure in both the fine art and music scenes, asserting that the two practices complement each other. Her series exhibited at Intersticio[1] has the artist indulging in her fascination of tracing her own time charts. She explores how dissonance, harmony, or synchronization can occur when different cycles of daily life are merged together, and how they can be fractured and stretched by changes and events. The works exhibited in ‘Time Keepers’, just like calendars or maps, are organizational structures, yet their main distinction is that they hold no functional being other than their beauty. The artist is interested in how representation and figurative language influence the way we read reality, and how these knowledge systems in turn inscribe themselves as a cultural form onto our bodies and the landscape we live in. I talked to Odersky about her latest relief paintings, the interrelation between her musical and artistic output, and how her nomad biography informs a metamorphic cycle, crumbling constrictive power relations.