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 was curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator Emma Enderby.
'Earth Potential' transformed 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 layered alien-like, yet terrestrial animals and organisms over celestial bodies and planets. By creating images at once scientific and poetic, these dramatic, visual objects exposed worlds unseen by the naked eye yet indispensable to human advancement. Earth Potential expanded Novitskova’s ongoing investigation into today’s media-saturated culture and continued her interest in the relationship between technology, scientific research, and the physical world. The large cut-out sculptures, six to eight feet in diameter, consisted 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 was 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).
ON VIEW: 22nd June to 9th November, 2017
