sermin kardestuncer 15 march - 15 april 1999   Art in America Sermin Kardestuncer Pierogi 2000 "For her first solo show in nine years, Sermin Kardestuncer offered a handsome assortment of work, including several sculptural pieces and works on paper and two large wall installations. She tends to use fairly humble substancesÑsuch as rice paper, thread, plaster, wood and candle waxÑand restricts her palette to shades of white, black, brown and gray. In her hands...these minimal materials achieve a subtle variegation and depth that recall Agnes Martin's abstraction. In her wall installations Kardestuncer used a drill instead of a needle, and clay balls instead of wax drips. For one piece, she inscribed two rectangles on a hollow wall by drilling vertical lines of holes through which she wove gray thread; for the other, she chiseled a square from the sheetrock and filled this niche with white-painted clay balls. Though both pieces were made in Kardestuncer's studio and painted to match the exhibition space, the installation was so seamlessly smooth that it looked as though she'd sewn and gouged directly into the gallery walls. The show also included some intriguing sculptural work; here, Kardestuncer used flat elements and pigments to make three-dimensional volumes. In Paper Pile she offered a ream of brilliant white writing papers whose stiffly curled edges were stained with black ink; in Blanket Pile she displayed two unequal stacks of felted ocher fabric, one of which was saturated with white paint. These pieces were displayed on two-legged tables whose back edges disappeared into the wall. Like everything else in this haptic show, they seemed the result of inventiveness, careful observation and thoughtfully deployed detail." February 2000 Carol Kino
	P   I   E   R   O   G   I     2   0   0   0 177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144 noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york