Rhapsodic Love is Chroma Construcion. Dannielle Tegeder paints fictive subteranean cities, influenced by the structural models of cityscapes, technological designs and the architectural plans of Zaha Hadid, Paulo Solari and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Whistl each of Tegeder’s cities has it’s own peculiarities, they are all composed of geometrical forms and visual symbols related to functions that the artist has slowly conveived: aerial and underground transportation networks, tunnels, canals, heatings systems, reservoirs, etc. What results from these is a glossary of roughtly one hundred fictive functions and structures directly related to reality. When connected between them, they create utopian landscapes. The titles, generally unusually long, refuse punctuation and syntax. They constitute a verbal connotation of her painting’s pictorial language, just like the exhibition’s title.

Exempt of any human representation, each painting takes on the aspect of an exploded view as a plan. A horizon line is there to represent the sufrace of the earth. The mediums Tegeder uses are as variegated and complex as her pictorial or verbal means. The artist mixes mediums and textures, gouaches, inks, pens, charcoals.

Simultaneously with her paintings, Dannielle Tegeder will present for her first show with Galerie Xippas, a number of three dimensional works that create a monumental and stupefying representation of her concept of urban utopia. Five pedestals occupy the center stage of the gallery. They represent a ground from which strange constructions emerge. Here the cityscape is no longer below ground but comes as an enhancement to the dreamlike aspect of the Tegeder’s work.

If the anticipatory spaces contain a certain pessimistic dimension – going bellow ground suggesting a desire to hide or to protect oneself – Tegeder’s worlds are ultimately less a projection of fear and more a voyage through the artist’s desires. A dream in a dream who’s strangeness dissapears.

After graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in 1991 and the Chicago Art Institute in 1997, Dannielle Tegeder lives and works in New York. Her works have been presented on numerous occasions of one person shows such as at the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco in 2005 et 2003, or Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in New York in 2004. She took part in a number of important group shows: Open House at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2004, and Selections at P.S.1/MOMA en 2003. She took part in numerous residencies: National Studio Program, PS1 Museum MOMA in 2003 and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Fellowship, New York in 2001 ; she is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Prize in 2003.