For her first exhibition at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Rey Akdogan further explores the use of the vernacular and its intervention on the perceptual, spatial, and material. Continuing her work with everyday plastics, lighting gels, correction filters, Cinefoils, light diffusers and other types of commercial packaging, her practice invites the viewer to investigate through the interrelation of these materials what was already there and to assume a new approach to looking that is historically, materially, and formally more aware.

In Carousel #7, 2014, Akdogan has constructed abstractions from the iconic plastic bags of the German discount supermarkets Aldi North and Aldi South. Distinct from the design of its Southern counterpoint, Aldi South, the Aldi North bag was designed by the German abstract painter and printmaker Günter Fruhtrunk in 1970. Akdogan first cuts, edits and physically layers the bag’s forms, color pigments, and atmospheric qualities within the restricted space of 35mm slide. The surface constraints and material limitations are then explored sequentially in this work by projecting the slides through a standard Kodak carousel.

The exhibition continues in the main and front galleries and includes a range of wall works made specifically from the Günter Fruhtrunk bag as well as a range of materials subjected to analogous permutations and large-scale processes. The rigid abstract surfaces have been cut, glazed, matted, peeled, scraped, torn, folded, frottaged, and put through Xerox machines. The hues have been intensified and confused alternately saturated and drained of color pigments. Separating these surfaces into different episodic zones in the gallery through modular systems that belong to the infrastructure of print, advertising, and design, these manipulations extend the sequential, temporal logic of the slides but in a still format. The largest piece is a clear industrial PVC curtain typically found in loading docks of warehouses and supermarkets. Physically, the curtain bisects the gallery space in two segments, creating a filter like layer that un-sharpens the vision.

Akdogan’s work appears in various scales and are sometimes sticky, stubborn, and repellent in the making. They are put through intense and varied manipulations, which expose and at the same time confirm the materiality of the object. Assembled from the same plastic surfaces used to construct the carousel, they operate at a scale that can not be contained within the frame of the slides and instead spills outward into the gallery space.

Rey Akdogan was born in Germany in 1974. She completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004 after receiving her MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2001. She has exhibited extensively in Europe and North America. Recent exhibitions dedicated to her work include night curtain (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2012), off set (MoMA PS1, 2012), Silent Partner, (Andrew Roth Gal- lery, 2012), carousels, rolls, and offcuts (Campoli Presti, London, 2011), and Universal Fittings (Common Room2, 2008). She has also been included in group exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Real Fine Arts, Simone Subal Gallery, Elisabeth Ivers Gallery (all in New York), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), and Rodeo Gallery (Istanbul). #46, a book of the artist’s work, was published by PPP Editions in 2012. Conceived as an extended footnote to her use of slide carousels and lighting alterations, it unfolds as a handheld slide projection in book form.