Grieder Contemporary is delighted to be hosting the first solo exhibition by Melli Ink at its new premises on Zurich's Mühlebachstrasse. The Austrian artist has continued producing glass works in the series inspired by Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, in addition to which she began, this year, exploring the oeuvre of Joan Miró and his era through the media of ceramics, sculpture and drawings.

In her approach to her work, Melli Ink seeks to reference art-historical themes. As with earlier work groups, for which the artist paid close attention to Albrecht Dürer's Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Ernst Haeckel's Artforms of Nature, she subjected the pictorial expression of both Bosch and Miró to intense analysis before interpreting it.

Commissioned by Count Henry III of Nassau, who resided in Brussels, it is thought that Hieronymus Bosch painted his Garden of Earthly Delights between 1500 and 1505. Due to the comparability of pictorial motifs and drolleries in book illuminations, the assumption is that much of what is considered puzzling, visionary, surreal or esoteric in Bosch's work today was actually, at the time he was working, generally comprehensible. The Garden of Earthly Delights was already a much-copied subject in the 16th century. This tradition of response has been carried into the present day, for instance by Franz West, creator of a sculpture trail of the same name for the Privy Gardens of the Vienna Belvedere.

Melli Ink aligns herself with this tradition through her analysis and interpretation of the Garden of Earthly Delights. She initially concentrated on four of the fantastical tower-like structures. Fascinated by the surreal motifs, she investigated Bosch's triptych as if using a digital zoom lens and, in so doing, separated the relevant from the unimportant. Some elements were given greater weight than others, and proportions were altered. The artist then remixed this ensemble portrayal of townscape and landscape.

The starting point of her exploration of the oeuvre of Joan Miró was a visit she paid to a book dealer in Zurich last spring. The fact that monographs featuring his work were not finding many buyers piqued her interest in the artist. She focused in particular on Joan Miró's mythologically charged sign world, especially the interplay of circles and lines. His sculptures, the tapestries from his late work, his collaboration with Alexander Calder and the oeuvre of Max Bill are just some of the sources that have inspired Melli Ink in her new Constellations group of works. Following on from this, she has again begun distancing herself from a figurative style of working this year and has now adopted a more abstract idiom.

A clear separation exists between the two groups of works, both spatially and in terms of colour. While the entire inner space of the luminous yellow cuboid gallery is given over to the oeuvre of Hieronymus Bosch, the blue rear wall of the gallery and its exterior walls feature works from the Constellations series.