Presence of Absence - Saint Peter's Church is pleased to announce Helga von Eicken Kopperl's sculpture installation of white silk figures and works on paper "Presence of Absence", May 3 to June 22, 2003.

Saint Peter's Church at Citicorp is located at 619 Lexington Avenue. The entrance is on 54th Street. Gallery hours are 8am - 8pm daily.

Helga von Eicken Kopperl was born in Montreal Canada and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg PA. Performance poetry and art venues include The Manhattan Theatre Club and The Alternative Museum in New York. As a visual and installation artist exhibitions have included the Patrice Landau and Donahue/Sosinski Galleries, Artists Space, A.I.R., Elston Fine Arts, Kunst und Technik-Berlin, La Mama La Galleria. Residency and Museum collections: The American Academy in Rome; The Museo Zoologico, Rome; The Museum of Modern Art, NYC. She is currently constructing an installation of translucent white silk trees, made in the woods, as witness to our endangered forests.

The Presence of Absence describes figures no longer present in their original form. Wet silk creates a body cocoon. A spider's web of overlapping lines draped round. When completed, a sense of the absent body remains.

"Odd materials, iconic images and beauty skewed draw me. My focus is on the internal world. By emptying the core of the body I explore the connections between exterior and interior. The sculptures are a visual memory of the short time period in which they were modeled. But over the long term they change and grow more abstract."

"I experience these figures not as portraits with personality but as essences. There is something akin to spiritual exercise in their making. They appear frozen as if some force has stopped them. Light passes through giving them a semblance of purity. Pairs of translucent feet, feet of friends and their families, explore a universal theme of shared footsteps. Works of pinched Japanese paper also refer to hands working directly with a material."

Pairs of translucent feet, feet of friends and their families, explore a universal theme of shared footsteps. Works of pinched white and gilded Japanese paper also refer to hands in direct contact with a material.