Gulia Groenke
"Minus 10"

THE ARTIST

 

Gulia Groenke was born in 1974 in Norilsk in northern Siberia in the Soviet Union. In her youth, she experienced firsthand the harsh conditions of life in the permafrost and in an industrial city that grew out of the Stalinist Gulag labor camps of the 1930s to 1950s. As a young adult, she quickly moved to faraway Western Europe, where she immediately gained a foothold.

 

Gulia's creative inclinations were evident in her childhood and later when she found work with an established fashion entrepreneur. However, it was not until she followed her husband to the USA that she began to pursue her artistic activities. There she suddenly found herself surrounded by renowned artists such as Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Brian Maguire, Sharon Kopriva and Stephen Schulz, to name but a few. The influence of these figures is certainly evident in her early work. More important than their stylistic influence, however, was the initial spark that such a creative environment ignited in Gulia.

 

Her more recent work has evolved both stylistically and in terms of content, and is very different from that of her peers. Her repertoire ranges from abstract expressionism to surrealist and photorealist approaches. In terms of content, she mostly deals with issues of social relevance. This includes environmental issues as well as social hotspots.

 

Gulia lives with her husband in Dallas, Berlin and Hope, Idaho, where she maintains her main studio.

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MINUS 10

 

The exhibition should not be seen in a political light, especially given current events. Rather, it depicts the lives of ordinary people in regions that are rather foreign to most of us. Although there are many similar regions in the world, the artist uses the city of Norilsk as an example to describe living conditions in an industrial region about 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

 

During the winter months, people here are confronted with almost constant darkness and average temperatures of -40°. In the summer, people often suffer from insomnia because there is constant daylight. The northernmost city in the world, with a population of more than 180,000, is also one of the most polluted. Unfiltered fumes from nickel, platinum and other factories do not only harm the environment. The unhealthy lifestyle typical of the region also affects the health of the population.

 

In the Russian Federation, the average life expectancy of the population at the time of the creation of the central painting of this exhibition "Minus 10" was 67 years. However, due to the adverse circumstances described above, people in Norilsk can only expect to live to 57, ten years less.

 

And yet people are drawn here. Significantly higher wages, above-average vacation time, and a much lower retirement age are the main reasons. During their careers, people try to live their lives with a certain optimism, even in this bleak environment, and attempt to bring some color and joie de vivre into the cityscape as well as into their own homes.

 

"Minus 10" shows this interplay between the bleak conditions of the region and the city on the one hand, and the optimistic approach of the people living there to make life a little better for themselves on the other.

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GUS KOPRIVA

President, Redbud Arts Center

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 Legoland (2024), Gulia marks the plight of the resilient residents as shadows adjoining gigantic dark black smokestacks in Foul Fuel (2024).

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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.