Annika Koops: Frame Break
In "Frame Break" Koops uses illusionistic painting to question how images today claim truth. By reworking her own gestures, she explores how images “capture” meaning and bodies, using painting to open up more flexible ways of understanding that allow multiple, even conflicting meanings to exist at once.
'Frame Break' conjures both the trick form of trompe l’oeil painting and also refers to the actions of the workers associated with the Luddite movement of 19th-century England, who destroyed the stocking frame machines built to replace them.
This exhibition uses the historically marginal form of trompe l’oeil to explore the unstable -or entirely absent - truth claims that shape contemporary image economies. It also highlights painting as an embodied, ancient technology, using it to carefully and playfully rework existing frames of reference and imagine new ways of seeing. The paintings extend a methodology that involves re-staging gestures and compositional elements through digital simulations developed through my ongoing series ‘Double Binds’. When I re-stage my own embodied gestures, it’s a way of diagnosing and undercutting the logics of capture, not toward endless equivocating, but to forge space for expanded knowing that is able to hold contradictory registers of meaning together at once.
- Annika Koops, 2025
