Docu-Press (3), Artist in Residency at Frans Maserell Centrum, 2014

Short version  

Distinctive for Gowara Minsa's woodcuts, drawings, cut outs, etchings and sporadic paintings are the intuitive drawing of creatures between man and animal, and a meaning that develops during the artistic process. There’s something (German) expressionist about her work, but you will also find influences of the naive Art Brut or outsider artist David Shrigley and his irony.
Gowara Minsa's horror vacui world is populated with inbetween-creatures: they evolve from raw lines, consist of grotesque hands and facial expressions and create impressions in word and image. The woodcut itself gets more plasticity: with a laser cutter, Gowara Minsa cuts hands, feet or silhouettes that she works on in a rather brutal way creating a friction between precision and spontaneity.

During her residency at Frans Masereel Centrum, Gowara Minsa is deepening her research on the influence of the background on the final print. 

(Laurence Scherz) 

Long version

Characteristic of the woodcuts, drawings, cut-outs, etchings, and occasional paintings of Gowara Minsa (°1982, Berlin) are the intuitively drawn creatures that exist somewhere between human and animal, and the meaning that develops during the process of creation. There is something (German) Expressionist in her work, but also influences from naïve Art Brut and the outsider artist David Shrigley and his irony—who, like Gowara Minsa, also occasionally makes animated films.

Working in formats ranging from A4 to enlarged A3 sheets, Gowara Minsa installs an imaginative world, almost like a visual stream of consciousness, giving you a glimpse into her mind. Clearly with great pleasure, she creates caricatural figures that are endearing, human, yet also animal-like. Hands, feet, facial expressions, or teeth are exaggerated within an associative universe. Gowara Minsa’s work emerges organically, without preliminary sketches and often without a predetermined plan, or as she herself describes it: “in a transformation.” The artist allows herself to be carried along by the cadence of the making process and by the will of the drawing itself. This results in richly filled images in which coarse strokes and shadows alternate with meticulous details, such as, for example, a carefully rendered animal pelt in a drypoint etching.

The variety of techniques has a major impact on the content of the work: again and again, Gowara Minsa creates a fictional world full of (textual, almost diary-like) impressions. You encounter sentences that are taken directly from the artist’s surroundings, such as Suche Zahnmodell, please call me now (2011), accompanying an image of a monster holding a telephone. By placing this text in the “margin,” Gowara Minsa offers possible associations but never closes off the work; she always leaves the interpretation to you, the viewer. Rather than presenting an emotional view of things, Gowara Minsa offers a probing, often ironic gaze at her surroundings. The layering of meaning is also literally present in the work: she frequently uses cut-outs—(black) silhouettes that gain depth when layered on top of one another. The content comes into being through the form. Minsa bends techniques to her will and selects the most suitable one each time, while also allowing herself to be guided by spontaneity and materiality.

Gowara Minsa’s work recalls German Expressionism, particularly the members of Die Brücke with their rough woodcuts and strong black-and-white contrasts. Yet color also appears—colors that, for Gowara Minsa, must always be powerful—as well as the horror vacui typical of Art Brut. The raw, associative force in Gowara Minsa’s work and her idiosyncratic figures also draw inspiration from the work of the Japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami. Tanaami’s overloaded images are almost impossible to take in at a glance. They are filled with tiny figures performing improper acts. Likewise, in Gowara Minsa’s scenes you discover “storylines” that do not entirely make sense.

In the work she created during her residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Gowara Minsa returns to her experiments with the surface, the plastic support. With her woodcuts she breaks free from the rigid framework of the rectangular frame. Using a laser cutter with precision, she cuts out little creatures, which she then enthusiastically carves into. The sharp contours of these woodcuts stand in stark contrast to the (watercolor) drawings from an earlier period, where one encounters more painterly lines and patches of color. In this new work, animality reigns supreme, with small “cut-out” bones and skulls serving as loose attributes alongside almost sculptural woodcuts. In her installation, Gowara Minsa plays with the embodied figures and their different scales. The support now—finally—stands on its own.

Laurence Scherz (translated from Belgian)