FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nice and Fit is pleased to present No Solid Crystal set in an alluring, abandoned first floor apartment of a 19th century building in Kerameikos, a changing neighbourhood in downtown Athens.

The show was formulated as a response to the site: what surrounds it (a city that has undergone radical transformations, grappling to process and address them socially and politically), and what it could enclose (rather than exhibit).

On the façade, a neon sign by the Paris based artist collective Claire Fontaine reads ξενοι παντου. Produced in greek for this venue, “Foreigners Everywhere” has appeared in other cities, languages and contexts. That the double meaning of this message resonates in New York, Paris and Athens among other places, expresses the magnitude of a condition of displacement, both political and existential.

Words make their way into most artists’ work in No Solid Crystal : the group of drawings by Andrea Bowers with motifs drawn from 1914 issues of the Anarchist Chronicle, the Metal Poems of Angela Mewes and Frederic D’s film Good Colors, Bad Colors. And of course, in the publications by Primary Information, New York and Sternberg Press, Berlin featured in the gallery bookstore.

Andrea Bowers’ work is anchored in archival research that many times deals with the histories of previous generations of activists. She uses video, installation, performance and drawing to bring these findings into the field of art. Text, embroidered on fabrics, or laboriously drawn with graphite and color pencils on paper, relays social, political and personal realities.

Good Colors, Bad Colors is based on extensive footage that Frederic D. shot in the streets of Kreuzberg documenting teenage gang fights, the junkies in Kotbusser Tor and the full moon, one spring night in 2007. Through several super impositions the material has been reorganized into an almost immobile abstraction; the title remaining on all frames announces a narrative that is never delivered.

Angela Mewes, besides her poems carved in metal will be engaged in an arrangement of found materials. Clearing instead of adding, she is waking objects from their sleep, as she habitually does in her sculptural work. Plastic bodega bags are released from a similar state of indifference by artist Josh Blackwell through the humble tradition of embroidery. With a marked interest in repetition, pattern and color his playful and subtly seductive surfaces merge with the unusually painted apartment.

The title of the show is drawn from Karl Marx’s preface to the first edition of Das Kapital written in London in July 1867. In his four page text he points to the great social transformations made possible through the declarations of Mr. Wade, then Vice-President of the United States and concludes that “.....they do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will occur but that.......the present society is no solid crystal but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change”.

Primary Information, the New York based non-profit has been publishing artists’ books and writings, as well as producing out-of-print publications from the 1960’s, 70s and 80s. In Athens they are presenting the just-released CD Disband, the full Great Bear Pamphlets, REAL LIFE Magazine and the Art Workers’ Coalition newspaper among others. Sternberg Press, based in Berlin has a strong emphasis on contemporary art criticism: Dietrich Dietrichsen’s essay On (Surplus) Value in Art and Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Radicant are two of the titles that will be available through the gallery in June and July.

For additional information on the artists, a full list of available titles and images please contact the gallery at mail@niceandfitgallery.com or Helena Papadopoulos at +49 172 313 7252.