Michael Graeve: Spatial Choreography

Michael Graeve is both a painter and a musician. He doesn't play a traditional instrument, but organizes sounds and noises (that he creates himself) of a generically electric or electronic nature. One could say that he uses 'a musician's palette', juxtaposing on canvases or on wooden panels strips of colour (horizontal or vertical) of the same length and of variable width, selecting colour combinations so as to create a visual rhythm, and therefore music which will be perceived by the observer in a synaesthetic way. As far as sounds are concerned, during his performances, he combines them together as he searches for impromptu harmonies, or he comes up with veritable compositions, and they are spread in the same area where the paintings are placed. In the latter case (for instance, in 2006 with “psc” at sonambiente in Berlin and now, on the occasion of the exhibition “Spatial Choreography”), two more elements come into play: artificial light (diffused by neon tubes) and space, that is the area where the dance between sounds, colours and light takes place. The spatial element is especially fundamental in order to allow Graeve to create a dimension of possibilities, also thanks to the mediation – in turn, fundamental – performed by the eyes and ears of the spectator, who is left with the possibility (or responsibility) of seizing the motions of this choreography, in the atmosphere where they secretly take place.
Michael Graeve returns to Turin about a year and a half after his participation to visionair-08, in December 2008, with the performance “Simple Methods for Complex Times”. He will present at blank, starting from Thursday 3rd June at 7 pm, an installation made up of a series of paintings created right here in Turin, placed in different, unusual points in space so as to make them 'dance' together, both space and paintings, to sound frequencies originating from sources positioned elsewhere.

Starting already from the '90s, Michael Graeve (an Australian of German origins born in Melbourne in 1971) held both solo and group exhibitions in various galleries and public spaces in Melbourne and Sydney, and then in the United States (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gigantic ArtSpace in New York, Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Enemy in Chicago) and in Europe (sonambiente 2006 in Berlin, the Tonspur Residency of the Museumquartier in Vienna, the Museum im Kulturspeicher in Wurzburg, amongst others). Also author of various record productions, he did many sound performances in Australia, the United States, Europe.