Adriana Czernin

Adriana Czernin will talk about ornament and its significance in her work. She has explored the topic for many years, producing series of works in which ornament plays a decisive role.

She will speak about ornament as the principle of repetition, about geometric ornament and its aspiration towards an ideal; about simple ornamental structures that generate a complicated pattern, continuing into infinity. She will deal with ornament as a complex set of rules which engenders intransigence and totality, and tell of her analysis of an ornament in the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo and her attempt to render this experience in her own pictorial vocabulary.

The significance of ornament as an expression of tradition, culture and religion is made clear, together with its function as a representative image of society, and its ambivalence between aesthetics and function, freedom and dictate.