Every now and again a show comes along that just stays with you, and Gene Mann’s show at Andrew Edlin Gallery is one of them. I’ve been thinking about these works since I saw them over a month ago.
Gene Mann lives in Switzerland near Geneva but was born in France. The show at Andrew Edlin Gallery is her first New York solo exhibition. The works at Edlin are sensually textural; a blend of drawing and collage. The pieces are most definitely figurative collage works, but they have an expressive, painterly feel to them and a movement that is both chaotically childlike and simultaneously haunting. There’s something about the way the materials are manipulated and how the elements bleed into and over one another; like thoughts and stolen moments. Dreams and memory. The collection of elements are torn and pieced and drawn upon and torn again before coming together to form their rich dreamlike narrative quality, and these stories linger.