Andreas Grimm is happy to announce an exhibition of new works by Katarina Burin at his New York gallery (formerly Grimm|Rosenfeld), opening September 8 through October 13, 2007.

In her second one-person show at the gallery, Burin uses drawing, watercolor, stencil, paper cut-outs and a specially made aluminum room-divider to once again transform the gallery into a plaintive space where the viewer encounters a cast of characters (often overlooked) from the history of modern architecture.

The room-divider, a variant of a large metal screen built by Burin for an exhibit in an Arts and Crafts Mansion in London is in three parts and can be re-arranged and installed in different configurations. While the structure of the screen draws on Prouve’s ironwork lexicon, the screen’s panels are made up of archival inkjet prints of images of interiors from designer Eileen Gray’s E 1027 beach house. Details from the old photos of the space, such as bathroom mirrors, a built in vanity and a writing table in the studio, are enlarged, cut up and dissected by the bars and the negative spaces of the screen’s structure.

In new works on paper, Burin overlays photographic images – other interiors designed by Eileen Gray, also portraits of Gray and of Charlotte Perriand – with patterns and designs that confound and complicate the original image. The patterns act as screens to obscure the space and become representative of how obscured our understanding of history often can be.

In other works, these overlays take the form of different registers of process or technique. There are several drawings of buildings with ambiguous captions made using stencils and a spray technique. Inspired by architectural drawings and blueprints from the past, they are somewhat like stencils in themselves, highlighting and using dated, pre-digital ways of making an image. Others are more like posters, in part made mechanically, yet also exquisitely hand-done. Cutout paper works—essentially stencils, referencing early American stained glass window patterns, are at once straightforward designs, drawings in their own right and tools for making a drawing. In this way, Burin’s work circulates between a very personal history of 20th century design (and design’s protagonists) and a representation of the studio, enacted by works that seem to hover evocatively between open-ended drawing and functional design-in-process.

Katarina Burin lives and works in Berlin. She was recently featured in an exhibition at White Columns New York. She has participated in exhibitions at Künstlerahaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz, Austria and was the recipient of the A-9 Forum Transeuropa, Museums Quartier, Wien.