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Gizmo's Kiss. A kiss from Gizmo. Mysterious, impulsive. Unflustered, and yet still powerful. What is that?

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Before getting to know Anna Amadio better, I thought her theme was harmony; harmony between forms and colours, planes and space. That was a theme which I was not very interested in initially, although I could not deny that, in terms of yearning, it did have a certain potential. But still, I liked and respected the way she solved these harmony issues, the way she approached them. But something always got in the way. Harmony, that balmy fragrance of a happiness that is tired and unwilling to argue.

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Then the situation changed at some point. I think it was in one of her large drawings, in which pretty and gentle hints of landscape were set down at various points over apparently scrawled, casually placed planes. But it could also have happened during one of our numerous talks about art and the everyday, about rooms or keeping dogs. Perhaps it was a gaze, the irrevocability of which suddenly made everything clear. Gizmo's Kiss. But who knows what a gizmo really is?

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Gizmo is a slang term which was coined in North Africa in the 1940s. It derives from the Arabic "shu ismo", which means something like thing-uma-jig or gadget. If you are looking for a word for something and cannot find an appropriate one quick enough, you use "gizmo". Anna Amadio first heard this term used while she was in New York in 2004, organising her exhibition for the Kunstverein Freiburg.

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In a spectacular and at the same time subtle way, the work Gizmo's Kiss summarizes important stages in Anna Amadio's artistic development and also throws them nonchalantly overboard. In recent years Amadio's artistic approach has liberated itself from her great ability to handle space, an ability which was beginning to get in her way when it came to demonstrating her second ability: her specific, melancholic way of linking narrative structures by aesthetic means. All her works contain this apparent contradiction, between an aesthetic that charms the viewer and the simultaneously staged possibilities of conspiratorially undermining that aesthetic.

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Which came first, the title or the idea for the work? The search for an appropriate term for something that provides no clear explanation, or a word that further stimulates an already existing interest?

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One thing is certain, and that is that the work Gizmo's Kiss stands for a new stage in Amadio's art. Whereas her earlier works were focussed more on balancing the artistic means, the proportions, materials and colours, Gizmo's Kiss, with its expansive and altogether curious shape and equally strange coloration, seems quite original, almost unique.

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At the time when Anna Amadio left for New York, she already knew that she would be having a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Freiburg. The Kunstverein is architecturally specific in so far as it was formerly an indoor swimming pool with a nine-metre-high ceiling. Half way up to the ceiling there is a gallery from which it is possible to look down into the hall and so view everything from above. Anna Amadio was strongly motivated by this architectural situation to link pictorial and sculptural structures, or to put it another way: to recognize the physical encounter with sculpture as just as important as the immersion in the pictorial world of painting, which takes place more at a tentatively reflective rather than a physically direct level.

Both standpoints – if one can speak at all in this context of respective standpoints – give rise to an overall image of a work which, in its proportions, displaces space and at the same time opens up space through its painterly quality and an associatively free handling of figurative references. These are based, among other things, on Anna Amadio's observations of New York house facades on which over the decades countless layers of paint have become superimposed and thus both condensed and at the same time extended the course of time – a process which is also vital for her works. Except that, for Amadio, the theme condensed or extended is not that of time, but of determining and being determined: the associative links in her works always proffer the possibility of intellectually breaking away from them, or grasping several standpoints as a unit.

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Gizmo's Kiss is a house. Unlike Amadio's earlier sculptural works which are filled with air, for Gizmo's Kiss she chooses the opposite process, creating a vacuum. The substructure is on a construction whose structure runs through the vacuum on the coloured polyethylene. Along the two side walls and the back wall of the Kunstverein Freiburg there were only narrow passages, conjuring up the impression of a street. Seen from the entrance, the front of the work seemed slightly concave and under constant tension (because of the vacuum). This resulted in a kind of stage situation, a model entrance to the building. Using a pseudo-architectural idiom, Anna Amadio opens metaphorically-oriented spaces, only to close them again by the same means.

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Gizmo's Kiss is painting. It is permissible, needless to say, to think of Frank Stella, but ultimately this is not very helpful. What is more interesting is to study Amadio's frottages of the past years, and the storyboards she produces while developing a new work. What you will find are colour planes in spatial structures, photographs of everyday life that become imaginative painterly architecture: perhaps Anna Amadio is a stronger artist than she is a sculptor, although the last word has not yet been said on that.

Her works of the past two years in particular exhibit a close link between sculptural and painterly discourse. What can already be claimed with a certain degree of assurance is that Anna Amadio's works want space. They love expanding. And they can expand.

Text Dorothea Strauss

Photos a.o. Marc Doradzillo