BARB WIRED CARDIAC

BARB WIRED CARDIAC

2015

From the Cardiac Distortion Series

Sepia ink, aluminium wire, oilbar, acrylic on acid-free paper

66 x 51 cm (26 x 20 in.) framed

Courtesy of the artist 

Barb Wire Cardiac, from Taline Temizian’s eleven-part Cardiac Distortion Series, represents a point of formal and conceptual transition in the artists’ practice, exemplified by a movement away from the representational towards strategies of minimalism and abstraction. The heart has long operated as a multi-faceted signifier in Temizian’s oeuvre, referencing her watchful childhood as the daughter of a cardiologist as well as connoting the emotional maturity and lived experience of the artist. In past work, anatomically rendered representations of the heart as both a medical and emotive organ have been influenced by a fine-art and design sensibility, while works within the Cardiac Distortion Series isolate the organ spatially, rendering affect an afterthought.

In Barb Wire Cardiac the heart itself is barely present, its arteries both sketched and heavily worked in stark black against the surface of the paper. The central presence of the piece takes the form of a tight coil of aluminum wire — a Duchamp-esque ‘readymade’ purchased by the artist from a garden shop and immediately incorporated into the composition. The urgency of this gesture mirrors Temizian’s process during the creation of the series, which she completed in a matter of weeks. As well as being a marker of experimentation with process and medium, Barb Wire Cardiac maintains some of the artist’s characteristic narrative gestures as the shadowed form of the heart seems to be both supported and protected by the wire armature, while concurrently being destroyed by its sharply violent form.