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Andrea Heller, Element, 2012, ink and guache on paper, 200 x 200 cm

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Andrea Heller, Untitled, 2013, ink on paper

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Andrea Heller, Installation View, the Agency

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Andrea Heller, Braeutigam, 2012, ink on paper

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Andrea Heller, Installation View, The Agency 2014

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Bada Song, Ta-iL, 2014, Installation View, the Agency

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Bada Song, Ta-iL, 2014, Installation View, the Agency

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Bada Song, Ta-iL VII, 2014, graphite on paper, detail 2013

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Bada Song, Red, 2014, diptych, oil on wooden boards, 20 x 46cm

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Bada Song, Untitled, 2014, oil on wooden board, 30 x 35 cm

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Bada Song 'Ta-iL, Gallery 1

Andrea Heller, 'Elements', Gallery 2

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Andrea Heller draws instinctively and applies personal visual memories as source material. Her work shows influences of the modernist canon as well as graphic art. Heller adheres to an organic and self-referential system of drawing. Using inks as a preferred medium, she never consciously chooses a colour but makes the choice by adhering to the pre-determined order of her acquired colour set. She also makes each mark just once with one dip of her brush, which results in the gradual fading of her mark. Within her chosen artistic medium Heller remains close to the rhizomatic nature of organic matter, allowing for accident and overlap in her graphically ordered, yet non-systemic motifs. The title of her most recent publication from her Helmhaus exhibition in Zurich was: Die Wurzeln sind die Baeume der Kartoffeln (The roots are the trees of the potatoes). This can be seen as a poetic reference to the rhizome as it occurs in nature but also a quietly humorous nod to an upside down world..

Andrea Heller’s work is strongly rooted in localised references to Swiss folk customs but also refers to the esoteric self-sufficiency models of Seventies’ hippie communities as a social model. She merges artifice and nature, also the handmade and mechanical reproduction in a playful manner and addresses drawing as a two-dimensional medium as well as stretching the medium into architectural interventions and installations

Andrea Heller lives in Zurich and Paris. Her solo exhibition in Helmhaus , Zurich, 2012 is accompanied by a monograph published by Edition Patrick Frey. She is represented by Galerie Scheublein+Bak in Zurich.

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Bada Song has been recognised for her strong position as a mark-maker who is influenced by her performance practice. Her approach to drawing is broad and cross-disciplinary, involving live performance, photography, sound pieces, video and painting.

The ‘ Leitmotif” of Song’s practice is Ta-iL, a continuing series of representations of traditional hanok roof-tiles as a symbolic pattern. The word Ta-iL is a phonological play on the English word “tile’. It does not exist in Korean but is made up by the artist in reference to the common appropriation of English words into the Korean language using familiar Korean sound patterns and English spelling. Song’s interest in the roof tile as a symbol of shelter stems from a specific Korean context: During the Japanese occupation of Korea until 1945 traditional house building was discouraged, and in the subsequent Korean War (1950-53) much of the housing stock was demolished. Post-war there were little funds and the devastated traditional hanok housing in urban and rural areas was rapidly replaced by hundreds of plain low-cost apartment blocks, built fast as company housing on the periphery of the urban centres of South Korea.

Despite the obvious and relevant direct references to hanok architecture, Ta-iL as a conceptual principle underpins most aspects of Bada Song’s practice. The tile/ cover also signifies shelter, covering, also the gesture of covering one’s face to hide emotions or covering one motif with another. Her recent triptych of ‘Yeonji’, 2013 consists of three elements: a photograph showing the artist as a traditional Korean bride, her face obliterated by a red circle, a diptych of sound pipes, covered in red nail varnish and lipstick marks emanating the sound of Bong Sun Flower, a Korean resistance song with a significant literary reference in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 post-structuralist novel ‘Dictee’ and thirdly a life performance of the song with the artist covered by a giant cloth hand sewn from red circular pieces. All three elements reveal different rigorous approaches to layering and covering as a wider application of mark-making. This is congruent with the dense graphite mark formations of her much more minimal Ta-iL drawings.

Bada Song’s work is a confident and intriguing way of negotiating drawing from a premise, which does not limit it to a genre. Instead her gestural and semiotic approach opens drawing up as a cross-medial art form.

Bada Song was born in Jeju Island, and grew up in Seoul, Korea. She moved to London over a decade ago and was awarded the Jerwood Prize( 2nd) for Drawing in 2012.