Nöle Giulini

Wholly

November 8 - December 21, 2024

Nöle Giulini’s ‘Wholly’ brings together two distinct projects from the 1990s that redefine figuration: The Bodypuppets and Holy Socks. These sculptures explore the borders that separate the human body from negative space. Through that process, her works bear the imprint of a pseudo-human form, depicting angels, puppets, and archetypes. Their delicate interplay of line and form prompts an ontological inquiry: Where does the body end and space begin? Or is it the other way around? How do you define a body? What are boundaries? How do we maintain and dissolve them and why? Where does nothing and something meet?.

Discarded materials, such as trash, fruit peels, lint, and in this case used clothing and kombucha scoby, are Giulini’s primary medium. Through a collaborative process, these materials find their voices again and take on a second life. For Giulini, the societal divisions created by refusing these objects deserves questioning. “I am determined to love the flawed and deficient into the wholeness from which they originally separated,” she claims. Its not that there is value in what others might consider trash, but rather that working with the rejected becomes a way of challenging value systems that created these designations in the first place. By listening to these items and transforming them into art, she participates in a kind of ethical world-building, a two-way exchange.

Giulini’s anthropomorphic sculptures hail our humanity. These are images of bodies that achieve their own affect—cheeky, surprising, scary. Their animus isn’t tied to their image but to the relation between body and material that created them. Astronomer Carl Sagan believed it was our ability to recognize and perceive others’ faces that created a stronger bond between infants and their caregivers, increasing their chance of thriving. To look for the human, or the human-like, in an object or entity is a method of survival. Giulini inverts this undertaking. For her, it is the non-human that is most alive, the most capable of showing us how to thrive. Giulini’s world is filled with vitality and devotion. Like a hymn, it vibrates a frequency of existence that connects us across time, space, and energy.

excerpts from text by Martha Joseph, 2024

Press Release by Martha Joseph

Giulini (b. 1958, Heidelberg, DE) lives and works in Port Townsend, WA

Giulini’s work is currently on view in the group exhibition ‘esprit’, curated by K.R.M. Mooney at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf, DE. Recent exhibitions include ‘Nöle Giulini, curated by Alan Longino, at 15 Orient New York, NY (2022) and ‘In the Shadow of Tall Necessities’, curated by Annika Eriksson and Fatima Hellberg at the Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, DE (2022), and ‘Conduit House’ curated by Jennifer Teets at April in Paris Fine Arts, Aerdenhout, NL (2023).

Giulini’s work has previously been shown at Paula Anglim Gallery, San Francisco (1992); Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland (1993), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (1994), New Museum, New York (1996); Tacoma Art Museum (2008); Heiliggeistkirche, Heidelberg (2012).