Ireen Zielonka

The Shy Stag Beetle
2017, Pen and ink drawing triptych, ink and shellac ink on paper
(86 × 43 cm) + (86 × 86 cm) + (86 × 43 cm)

Ireen Zielonka_Triptychon Der schuechterne Hirschkaefer_2017_Pen and ink drawing triptych, ink and shellac ink on paper.jpg
 

Left part 1: Headless, you let yourself be carried by what has happened.

Middle part 2: The inner strength is activated and makes everything around you tremble. 

Right part 3: One grows beyond oneself. The head is placed back the shoulders. With one's own courage, one stands firmly on the ground.  It’s time to look courageously into the future.


There is hardly a drawing of Zielonka’s in which no philosophical thought is the starting point for an allegorical representation. Her work posits the interactions between society and the individual and the unelected arrested-being with conventions, traditions and origins. Reflection, inquiry and pursuit of knowledge are mandatory as the scouts to act confidently and maturely, she adds. Zielonka’ s work negotiates the divide between what she refers to as the Gesellschaftsspiel (Company Game) and the Gesellschaftsmaschine (Company Machine).

Those who play the machine and those who are played by the machine. Influence has a social dimension, the ratio the individual between the two poles of emancipation and manipulation varies when influence, both external and internal, is introduced and acknowledged. The collage and mirror techniques of the Dadaists and their application in literature by William S. Burroughs (cut-up and fold-in) point to a formal technique, the paradox, introducing the random and the automated as a counterweight to the creative author. She has applied her thoughts to a way of working which is a mixture of strict composition, precision craftsmanship and controlled chaos. Here is where Zielonka’ s work steps away, piece by piece, from the distraction of colour to become refined art, offering room for reflection. Her habit of abstraction provides thoughful content of a particular depth, the kind Max Klinger called the “true organ of imagination” confronting the art of belief in drawing.