My Sentiments: Gulia Groenke Exhibition “Minus 10”

For years I have heard rumors of a large mysterious forbidden Siberian city located hundreds of miles above the Arctic circle. Norilsk is a resource rich industrial town with ghost ice-like buildings and a reputation for being one of the most contaminated places on our planet. The area is an isolated tree barren place surrounded by reddish glacial rivers that are illuminated by night less than a two-month period during a nine- month winter. Founded in 1936, the world has little knowledge of this place that appears to be post-apocalyptic in nature. There has been scant literature or art about this area until now.

German artist, Gulia Groenke, has masterfully created new works that capture the enigma and spirit of her birthplace. Her work blends her early formative personal journey with her family and the city.

Groenke is adept at capturing the history and spirit of a place in the manner of the great German Master Anselm Kiefer. Even more than Kiefer, she has expertly fused residential and family figures juxtaposed within the arctic landscapes of her maternal city. She successfully captures the minus 40 °C cold feel of the area along with its ghost-like ice adorned abandoned buildings Social Decay (2024).

The history of treeless forest remains are pictured in Gulias’s City X (2022) destroyed by spurious logging and sulphur dioxide acid rain. In the spirit of Sigmar Polke, Groenke addresses the humanity of the city’s inhabitants. Because of the harmful substances, workers toil in the copper smelting units wearing hose masks akin to those in Otto Dix’s World War One “Der Krieg” series Lego[waste]land (2024), Gulia marks the plight of the resilient residents as shadows adjoining gigantic dark black smokestacks in Foul Fuel (2024).

The title of Groenke’s Berlin exhibition is “Minus 10”. This does not refer to the temperature, but instead to the fact that the average life expectancy in Norilsk is ten years less than the rest of the Russian Federation. Her or society’s past, present and future are represented in Groenke’s recent master work Minus 10 (2024). This three figurative painting portrays the immense apogalactic landscape with polluted waters, barren forests, and contaminated atmospheres. The expert color usage of this painting’s using brownish yellow nitrous oxide clouds, whitish haze, and murky foul waters, drive the artist’s meaning home to the viewer via a masterful touch. Note the graveyard in the smoggy background.

Closer to home, ancestral graves have been disturbed by the moving tundra as pictured in Future Passing, 2020. The final resting place of the city’s populace remains in flux because of the restless earth. It is ironic that the world’s severe pollution caused by valuable mineral prod unction may someday be remediated by the same elements produced in Norilsk. One of Groenke’s Master works Core Exploitation (2020) depicts a huge circular crater adjacent to the city which immediately triggered my response to the writings of Canto I from the Inferno, the first part of the “Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. My immediate instinct was this scene adroitly and most appropriately depicts Dante’s nine gates to hell. The “Gates” have been rendered numerous times in our art history. This painting by Groenke stands out among its peers as it places the entry to hell next to an urbanized city. Many of Groenke’s landscapes immerse the observer with their enormity as they include the viewer as part of the site. Norilsk’s many smokestacks belch out some of the worst pollution on earth due to copper smelting. Groenke captures this horrendous scene in her surrealist piece full of symbolism entitled Assimilated Individualism (2024). The symbols situated in Sweet [but] Crude (2024) represent mysterious figures engulfed inside an egg like mineral ingot located in a sterile landscape accompanied by crimson waterways.

The purpose of art is to communicate and educate. Gulia Groenke has triumphed in this endeavor. Groenke’s work often incorporates non-traditional materials and techniques across various styles and movements. Social, aesthetic, and political traditions are firmly addressed and communicated in her body of work. For Groenke, her art subjects the viewer to a spiritual conversation between herself and the onlooker. The art is sensitive, gloomy, sometimes positive, and mysterious enough to be open to many differing dialogues. The viewer can virtually sense the icy breath of the “Capital of the Arctic”. The usage of collage materials engages the audience to experience the perception of this most enigmatic city and its formative effect on this very talented artist, Gulia Groenke. She is well on her way to occupy a place next to Germany’s great masters.

Gustav (Gus) Kopriva
President, Redbud Arts Center
September 15, 2024
Houston, Texas, USA

Brian Maguire about Gulia Groenke’s oeuvre

“Like most of us, I have never been to Russia or indeed to the Soviet Union. The nearest I got was a day in East Berlin in the early 80’s. In those days and still today there is a tighter net drawn around the forbidden secret cities of the Soviet Military Complex. Gulia and her family came from such a town in the North of Russia. Yet through Gulia’s paintings, I get to go there. I see the men bathe in the lake by the shore notwithstanding the contamination. The coffins give us the context. This work of 2020 is titled Future Passing and should be read with the earlier work from 2019 Polluted Tides. The landscape format of Future Passing is repeated in different ways in Inflamed Spirit (2020), Paradise (2020) and Imminent Destruction (2021).

While drawn from memory each one contains a view of our future. The atmosphere of some of these works is just short of post-nuclear. The current dangers for the world in war are clear today. Gulia has drawn this threat in paint. It was Picasso, a hundred years ago, who claimed painting as a defense against war. In this lies the seriousness of these works. The two great overriding issues of our time – the natural environment and war are the conditions of the present. The works are drawn from her youth. The work challenges us to note, now, today where we are and asks in silence what we should do – Circle of Devastation (2022).

It has been my honor and privilege to watch the development of this powerful and beautiful exhibition over the past 3 years.”

Brian Maguire is an Irish artist whose work is driven by the struggle against inequality and violence, and the pursuit of justice. Read more about the artist on Galleries Websites: Rhona Hoffman and Fergus McCaffrey