William Mackrell - Buch / Katalog  (Art Books)

Krinzinger Projekte presents Door for a day, a residency solo exhibition by British artist William Mackrell that takes the form of a constellation of experiments and enquiries made during and between his split residency periods in 2013 and 2016.

Ingesting and exercising his feelings of memory and re-visitation form the show’s starting point. Mackrell describes this residency as a “double-self” and “a show within a show”, that unfolds and cross-pollinates throughout the gallery rooms.

His arrival into the Projekte residency programme in 2013 was marked by a restless series of on-site body actions that grappled with feelings of inhabitation, tracing his collisions into fragile and unfamiliar territories he confronted.

Selected drawings, videos and texts form as a cluster of his experiences from 2013, which take over the central room and are accompanied by works that either continued in production or were remade in London during the aftermath of his first residency visit. Mackrell now re-approaches the 2013 works more as a collection of “found objects” which he has come to be reunited with. Like a stone being dropped into water from this central room, the previous works ripple across the adjacent rooms into the new work.

Mackrell also recalls his stay in February 2013 impacted by meeting fellow resident artist, Waqas Khan. Spending time with Khan and his intensive rhythm of mark making would go on to influence Mackrell’s own technique of scratching on photographic paper, expanding singular scratches into obsessive wave like forms, beginning from capturing the sensitivity of Mackrell’s moods and shifting presence, beginning in the work, Exposed (All my possessions). Since their meeting at Krinzinger Projekte, the two artists continue to have a close friendship.

Mackrell would go on to evolve this technique of scratching since 2014 in the on-going Human Condition series, meticulously cutting away images of body hair. More recently he is working on larger formats that completely readjust the viewer’s relationship with how we receive imagery, slowing down this sense of proliferation and speed of digital photography into tactile and seductive imaginaries.

Returning back to the Krinzinger Projekte in November 2016, Mackrell seeks a more contemplative engagement with the residency programme. Part of his time here has considered how to situate his work within the backdrop of Galerie Krinzinger’s extensive history of performance and painting. Dr. Ursula Krinzinger has generously provided access to the gallery’s archive of performances, including actions and performances by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Paul McCarthy and Marina Abramovic. Works from this vast collection have come to inform Mackrell’s latest series of lipstick paintings and performance installation, Interruption.

During the end of his residency in January 2017, Mackrell invited FormContent to collaborate on a evening salon at Krinzinger Projekte space. FormContent’s Pieternel Vermoortel and Ashlee Conery, led a residency within a residency lasting the length of a dinner. With Krinzinger Galerie staff and participants they expanded with Mackrell the states of settling, processing and becoming familiar that are necessitated within such an environment. This discussion adding to a line of research by FormContent entitled The Subject Interrupted which explores the current conditions of artists in practice; such is a state of permanent un-residence, evolutions followed by moments of dis-orientation and subsequent discovery.

William Mackrell (b.1983, London) lives and works in London.

2014-2016 MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London

2002-2005 BA Painting at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London