Diango Hernández, Summer Days, installation view, 2002.
Simon Starling, Shedboatshed, 2005.
Sergej Jensen, United Nations, 2005.
Candice Breitz, Mother + Father, detail, 2005.
Marcel van Eeden, Untitled, detail, 2006.
Sabine Hornig, Balkon, 2002.
Bjørn Melhus, Auto Center Drive, 2003.
Mathilde ter Heijne, Untitled, 2003.
Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet, Manual, 2002.
Annette Kelm, Reading a book about Robert Stacy-Judd, 2006.
Michael Sailstorfer, D-IBRB, 2001, Courtesy Johann König, Berlin, © VG Bild Kunst.
Jeppe Hein, Distance, 2004.
Amelie von Wulffen, Untitled, 2006, Courtesy Galerie Crone.
Henrik Olesen, Democracy. Desinformation. Exit., 2000.
Julius Popp, Micro.Spheres, 2003-2005.
Banjamin Bergmann, Komposisjon, 2002.
Jeanne Faust, andere wie mich, Bayern, detail, 2000.
Thomas Zipp, Ceci n’est pas, 2005.
Thomas Zipp, Schwarze Ballons (1. down, 2. up, 3. S.K., 4a. tumb...tumb..., 4b.ABCE, 5. little U-light, 6. L.E.M., 7. O.E., 8. Elektrizitait), 2005, 9 part installation, mixed media.
Florian Slotawa, Besitzarbeit Nr.9, Verkündigung, 2003.
Beate Gütschow, LS # 13, 2001.
Slawomir Elsner, Panorama 8 (Ausländisches Geld), 2006.
Oliver van den Berg, Sternenprojektor, 2005.
Andreas Hofer, We Will Buy Your Dreams, 2006, Acrylic lacquer, 200 x 180 cm.
Gabriel Vormstein, Untitled, 2005.
Michael Beutler, With Christoph and Lucie, 2003.
David Zink Yi, La cumbia, 2000, DVD; colour, sound, 00:03:13 (loop).
Bjorn Melhus, Eastern Western Park.
Armin Boehm, Untitled (Victim), 2006.
Tobias Zielony, Venice, 2007.
Haegue Yang, Non-Foldings, No. 2, 2007, Black lacquer spray paint on white paper, 244.5 x w: 150 cm.
RothStauffenberg
Tobias Zielony, from the series The Hidden. |
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Kunstverein Hannover
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Hannover
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Hannover
Sprengel Museum Hannover
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+49 511 16 84 - 39 24
Hannover
Made in Germany, Young Contemporary Art from Germany
May 25-August 26, 2007
Made in Germany, Young Contemporary Art from Germany concentrates on a younger generation of artists of German and international origin who live and work chiefly in Germany. The title Made in Germany, can be understood as programmatic in that it does not couple artistic identity solely with place of birth and biography but with the place where the artist produces the work of art.
The selection of 52 artistic positions is not claiming completeness but preferring a paradigmatic provisional assessment, while taking stock of the internationality of the art scene in this country. From the outset, the exhibition was guided by the desire to cover the entire spectrum and diversity of current art production.
The participating artists succeed in expanding and altering classical media in evolving their own aesthetic language. They have no qualms about combining images and information from a broad range of sources and situating them in new contexts. They effortlessly mix present-day elements with images from contemporary history long since entrenched in collective memory. And they draw on the rich fund of art history: concept art of the 1960s and 1970s, minimal and appropriation art.
At the content level, recurrent themes are in evidence: artists reacting to developments in our society by aesthetically condensing and hence spotlighting dependency processes and social structures, they submit the experience of the modern age to critical reflection, interrogating the relationship between private and public space, examining role patterns and their attribution, questioning the mechanisms of representation, and are always on the lookout for a good story.
Not least of all, biographical background plays a role: concern with one’s own identity, with one’s role as an artist, and with one’s origins. This examination is partly poetic and romantic, and it is always personal.
Benjamin Bergmann, a sculptor who works in wood and was born in Würzburg in 1968, lives and works in Munich. He is known for large, space-encompassing sculptures. Besides a number of projects in other regions of Germany, he has realized such works as Tunnelfassade (2005) in Munich. The subject of this architectural installation is the alterations to a tunnel entrance. Benjamin Bergmann transformed the tunnel, originally intended as nothing more than a place of passage for pedestrians and bicyclists, into a site which invites one to pause and thereby becomes physically perceptible. The artist doubled the tunnel’s opening, deliberately utilized light to raise its status into an imposing façade, and thereby freed the tunnel of its purely pragmatic function. Opposites such as light and shadow as well as bright and dark testify to Bergmann’s intensive investigation of Baroque architecture. At the same time, he thereby inserts his altered tunnel passage into the architectural context of the historical buildings of Munich. The unfinished character which the artist injects into his projects points to the fact that architecture is also subject to a constant process of change. Benjamin Bergmann has taken up a position — here just as in his other works — upon the border between reality and artificial space. He often actively includes himself or even the viewer in the installation.
— Mirka Knauf
As is the case for many younger artists who began working more than a generation after Happening or Land Art, Michael Beutler has no need of a lavishly outfitted studio. For him the exhibition site — the architecture and the specific spatial situation — serves as the point of departure for the conception of his work. Thus the exhibition space is used simultaneously as the site of production and presentation. In an on-site workshop, Beutler makes the elements, objects or sculptures which are combined into his installations. He uses cheap, commercial materials such as are sold by building retailers and wholesalers. As a special characteristic of his installations, the artist constructs devices which are indispensable for the realization of his projects. With the help of these “production apparatuses,” the artist creates only as much material as he requires for his artworks. The apparatus itself becomes a part of the installation and remains as a relic of the process of creation. This relationship between the temporally limited, on-site workshop activity and the actual artwork engenders a presentational situation whose playful openness conveys the impression that a certain stage of production has come to a standstill. Thus the process-like character and provisional, improvised appearance become deliberately invoked signs of the installation.
— Gabriele Sand
The painter Armin Boehm became known for his large-scale landscape pictures which expose to view shimmering urban landscapes extending before the observer beneath impressive, starry skies. The details of his pictures frequently convey a surreal shudder which transports and enhances their uncanny appearance. Old wrecked automobiles, ramshackle huts, and rotting tree trunks are the sort of details which seem like the stage-set of a bad dream. Serving as the basis for his paintings are photographs of specific places or film settings; thus this work phase presents motifs of Neuschwanstein or the hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s Shining . In his more recent works, Boehm concentrates on superficially unspectacular log cabins and apartment buildings which all, however, indicate sites where sects and religious groups have pursued their doctrines and, according to the respective degree of their fanaticism, transformed these sites into scenes of horrible crimes. The banality of the scenes stands in crass contradiction to the rituals and crimes which were carried out beyond the bounds of all social norms. Created parallel to these large-scale works are small-format portraits showing the victims of these crimes. With Camp (2006), a work which shows the bird’s-eye view of a training camp of Al-Qaeda shortly before its destruction by American bombers, Boehm turns to an increased extent towards abstraction and the theme of light — the effect is no less disturbing and fascinating than that of his older works.
— Frank-Thorsten Moll
The artistic career of Candice Breitz first developed in the field of photography; she took pictures of advertising images which she subsequently transformed and collaged with other pictures. Moreover, the human body, especially the female body, plays an important role in her oeuvre even if, as in Ghost Series (1994–1996) and Rainbow Series (1996), it is always seen to be something manipulated and fragmented. White surfaces sometimes overlie individual body parts or are themselves completely covered by other pictorial fragments and body parts. Candice Breitz also makes frequent use of the technique of collage in her investigation of video art. Thus in one of her earliest videos, Babel Series (1999), she presented various pop singers who repeated without a break one and the same syllable, using a variety of songs by performers like Madonna and Freddie Mercury as her source material. The artist seems always to be seeking the deepest sources for those striking social clichés which she has analyzed, for instance, in her video works Mother + Father from 2005, each time by means of six video films running parallel to each other. In Mother six well-known actresses from the United States may be seen in front of a black background in one of their respective maternal film roles; with their various characters, they portray a wide range of fictional mother-roles and clichés. The question which subsequently arises with regard to the validity of the (filmic) representation may be understood as a central aspect in the oeuvre of Candice Breitz.
— Frank-Thorsten Moll
In 1997 Fernando Bryce suddenly stopped painting and began to concentrate exclusively on drawing, which he uses as a tool for analyzing historical interconnections. In Visión de la pintura occidental (2003), Bryce plays the role of a museographer who, with ninety-six ink drawings and thirty-nine photographs, documents the Museum of Painting Reproductions of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima by making full-sized copies of the order lists, invoices and correspondence which he has selected from the archives — a strategy which has become his trademark and meanwhile has been used in several cycles of drawings. The aspect of reproduction, which for Walter Benjamin was equivalent to the loss of the aura, is thereby constantly examined by Bryce and takes a positive turn through the artisanal — and not technical — process of reproduction. The goal is always to remove from archival oblivion those historical connections seen from the subjective viewpoint of the artist, and to present them to the viewer for a new evaluation.
Bryce transforms the act of copying into an effective mode of investigation, and his cycles of drawings reveal new and surprising insights into the contemporary history which is thereby brought into the limelight. In East Asia Review (2006) the artist for the first time brings his drawings into relationship to a three-dimensional object which simultaneously becomes both observer and observed.
— Frank-Thorsten Moll
The artistic practice of Peggy Buth assumes truly existential dimensions when the artist grinds and burns wounds into the durable material of wall-to-wall carpeting or covers and seals surfaces with tar, then cuts them open. These are stubbornly insistent gestures of a feat of strength and repetition which attach themselves to the treated surface and, in their uncompromising absoluteness, serve as an outlet for social power structures consisting of rules of conduct, institutions, traditions, and assigned roles. Peggy Buth’s art makes use of the plain-and-simple essentiality of material substance. The clearly present potential for aggression not only is directed against the surface, but also undermines the content-related levels.
In Fireworks #4 as well as Red Corridor #1 (both 2005), Peggy Buth utilizes the red carpet, a symbol of prestigious public spectacle whose meaning is grounded in codes and norms. As a separated-off area, the red carpet conveys exclusivity — a widespread and often discriminatory mechanism of social definition which the artist shatters through invasive gestures. In contrast to this approach that is related to the present, the tar-coated sculpture Monument (2005) transports handed-down values as an architecture of remembrance. Seemingly aged and encrusted, yet held together only by a vaguely indicated flagpole, this work marks out our military and colonial or hegemonic past.
— Eveline Bernasconi
In his installations bearing such titles as Im Homunculus , Solaris , Schwarzes Loch or Utopia Planitia , Björn Dahlem attempts nothing less than to give form to the non-representable. His conglomerations of roof boarding, carpet remainders, Styrofoam and neon lights do not conceal their components and cohere into frightening, madly proliferating material-assemblages which thrust themselves into the exhibition space as a combination of trial arrangement and temporary structure. Dahlem transfers scientific models into the sphere of art or draws inspiration for his works from philosophy. Thus he is alchemist and hobbyist, researcher or storyteller, and he designs mental models hovering between sculpture and architecture: parallel universes with the ambition of serving as the dwelling of will-o’-the-wisp thoughts and, at the same time, of proposing a cosmic design to explain everything in terms of everything else.
Thus the precisely utilized materiality encounters complex, richly allusive contents and deals with physical phenomena and extra-terrestrial worlds: the themes include astrophysics, Plato’s cave and the hyperpsyche. Oscillating between burlesque and pseudo-science, between psychedelic flashes of light and deliberately staged enigmas, there is revealed an ambition to literally represent universal models: process-like, organic shapes which the viewer believes himself to be observing in the very act of thought.
— Martin Engler
The three- to ten-minute-long trick films of Nathalie Djurberg are dominated by sexual and pornographic motifs and contain scenes of violence and abuse as well as practices of pedophilia and sodomy — even if this tiny cosmos of perversions is presented with an appropriate portion of black humor. The spindly, thin figures (humans and animals) are formed from Plastilin and painted expressively; they move with the help of a simple, stop-motion technique whose effect is naïve. Through their production style, they recall the childhood years of film, with its clay animation and tricks with dolls, but the mysteries of human existence are thereby opened all the more deeply. The works address the question as to the origin of perversion, the interplay between sexuality and aggression. “Why do I want to do these things again and again?” asks Nathalie Djurberg’s best-known film Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt from 2004. A tiger moves its tongue across the buttocks of a young girl who is unable to remove herself from this explosive game of desire and danger. The artist produces her works quickly and keeps a tight rein on everything: she is screenplay writer, camera woman and director, all in one person. She also molds the figures, sews the costumes and builds the lavish scenery out of Plastilin and papier-mâché. Music by Hans Berg accompanies the inscrutable and grotesque scenes with fitting ballads, big-band sounds or merry rum-ta-ta.
— Susanne Meyer-Büser
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been working together since 1995. Their work seeks to examine existing structures which are socially encoded. In the series of Powerless Structures , the artistic duo challenges the conventional perception of space: architectural situations are reshaped in order to investigate the underlying expectations and conventions and to reflect upon the social structures and ideological attributions. In their project for the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Powerless Structures, Fig. 111 , architectural fittings were used to cause the floor of the hall and the light-ceiling to so curve towards each other that the three-dimensionality of the space was canceled, and the perceptual expectation of a white cube was irritated, ironized and called into question. “No structure is able to suppress anyone, not the structure itself. It’s only how you deal with the structures already being there, and all structures can be altered or mutated,” describes Michael Elmgreen this principle of intervention. The focus of their projects, installations and performances is on the deconstruction and construction of the established and institutionalized significance of spaces: “Space in Elmgreen & Dragset’s work doesn’t announce itself, it has to be brought out, challenged by the mundane presence of the activities that frame it; it begs you to perform. Rather: It makes you perform, because it analogises several types of behavior.”
— Gabriele Sand
Marcel van Eeden’s oeuvre develops within a narrow framework. He concentrates on the medium of drawing, which as a rule applies black to a white (or infrequently colored) background, and he encloses each sheet at a relatively short distance to the frame. This self-imposed limitation, however, is broken up by the large number of drawings which constitute each series and serve for developing narratives. Thus in what is up to now his best-known work, K.M. Wiegand , van Eeden describes on more than 150 sheets the fictional life-stages of a man whose name only is that of a real person. Ever since 1993, the artist has used as the basis for his drawings only source material — books, photographs, newspapers, atlases — from the time before his birth. The models are not simply copied, however, but instead the diverse motifs are rendered in an illustrative manner, subordinated to the respective overarching narrative, and thereby reinvented each time. Within a sequence, the individual representations function like windows never opening wide but only allowing a fragmentary view — a perspective onto a past which, in accordance with the aesthetic of the nineteen-fifties, is rendered in a stylized manner: memory as an artificial construct. Each individual sheet stands in isolation as a sign of what has gone before. Sometimes the drawings seem elegiac, sometimes humorous, but always one senses the yearning for a lost era.
— Caroline Käding
Slawomir Elsner’s pictures are based on photographs. Organized in series, they give unsystematic treatment to highly varied thematic domains which are always situated at the interface between the public and the personal. Elsner’s painting transforms the collective element into a succinct and personal visual language, without renouncing communal referentiality. The pictures grow strange, the document is turned into allusive painting, and everyday reality tilts into an abyss of insecurity. The subjects of this process of assimilation can be American nuclear tests just as well as magazine pictures or well-intentioned but absurd interventions into the urban-suburban living space by means of painting. His personal interest as a painter is constantly kindled by fundamental questions of representation and the aesthetic reflection of our real and media-created world. In Panorama , Elsner imposes upon the pictures of a Polish newspaper from the year of his birth a painterly rereading which investigates both the artist’s own origins and the media aesthetic of the nineteen-seventies. In Kilotons the fascination of the glaring atomic explosion becomes a painterly challenge: the inhuman brightness is both the primal cause and ultimate abyss of all visibility. By adapting a photographic mode here inevitably doomed to failure, painting flourishes with an aesthetic potential beyond all documentary representation.
— Martin Engler
Jeanne Faust works with the media of film and photography. In video installations such as Interview (2002) or My Private Satellite (2001/02), she seems first of all to convey the impression to the viewer that she is telling a story. Upon a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the artist maintains a distance to the narration, instead taking up the position of an observer. For My Private Satellite she observed the residents of a new block of apartments in Hamburg for two years. On the basis of the collected material, she wrote a screenplay combining documentary and fictional aspects. Individual episodes were strung together, and the techniques of deconstruction were utilized. Jeanne Faust took up a story line but did not pursue it to a conclusion; instead she left the plot hanging and seized the first opportunity to turn to another figure with a different story, so that one narration followed the other until at the end things come full circle. The artist frequently engages the visual and filmic memory of the viewers. She leaves it to their imaginations to weave into a coherent story the scanty information of individual scenes which often resemble feature-film takes. Her theme is less the identities of individual figures and more the process of narration itself. Again and again, Jeanne Faust addresses the question as to which technical means and plot information are necessary in order to construct a convincing story.
— Mirka Knauf
Ceal Floyer’s light projections, films, videos, audio pieces, photographs, works on paper, and sculptures are always set up in terms of a Minimalist language of form. The objects or motifs summon up certain associations, for instance in Bucket , where one automatically assumes the existence of a leak in the ceiling above the bucket, because a falling drop of water may be heard: something which is not present is engendered by the image that we see.
‘Til I Get It Right combines essential aspects of Floyer’s artistic practice, namely the loop and the play on words. In the audio piece, Tammy Wynette repeats this sequence of words as a song fragment so as to symbolize, just like an endlessly enclosed tautology, a failure which is further emphasized by the raw sadness of the singer’s voice. The audio piece recalls Samuel Becket’s line “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Floyer’s film projections assign the generated image to domains other than the process which calls it forth. Apollinaris depicts the fizzling of carbonic acid in a glass of water as dark patches with bright spots and sparks upon a wall. The solemn effect created by the bubbly water, which has turned into fountains of firework, is ironically broken by the enlarged scale and dramatic transformation. That which is actually an insignificant event is absurdly altered into a spectacular image.
— Caroline Käding
Ever since digital technology noisily and overwhelmingly stormed onto the field of photography, the medium has had to wince repeatedly at the question about the degree to which its traditionally distinctive characteristic, namely an indissoluble connection to the factual, still remains capable of providing a meaningful basis for photographic discourse. In his astounding and precisely balanced pictorial projects, Andreas Gefeller offers evidence of the type of foundations which may be laid down here without subsiding into anachronistic documentary fetishism. After the early work complexes Halbwertszeiten (1996) and Soma (2000), he has achieved with the large-scale series Supervisions (2002/2004) a discovery of reality by means of a construction which is both document and invention. With the help of a tripod attached to his body, the artist proceeds across a previously laid-out motific field and records it, step by step, in up to 2,500 individual shots. The composite picture which is subsequently generated digitally shows bird’s-eye views of sections of parking lots, precast-concrete buildings or a lawn strewn with golf balls — in other words, banal structural details, but such as we have never seen them before. The works are thereby transformed into reflections upon the dialectical structure of vision and visibility in general: that which we see actually does not exist. And, for a long time now, we have no longer been able to see that which does in fact exist.
— Stephan Berg
It is the question as to what lies behind the surface of pictures which preoccupies Christoph Girardet. Found footage material, primarily from films of the nineteen-fifties and -sixties, serves as his point of departure for a filmic investigation in which scenes and images are first broken apart and deconstructed, then put back together in a new manner which reveals the actual structures and inner mechanism of the reality which is depicted. In addition to the often elaborately composed soundtrack, a central role is played within this process of structural analysis by the slowing down of time, repetition and loops as well as methods of serial and rhythmic montage. What results are works which are impressive not only because of the precision with which they induce the pictorial structure to speak by means of a process that itself runs analogously to the original construction-process of these images. Even more strikingly, beyond the analysis of the material and its clichés there arises an utterly individual pictorial world which deals in essence with a fundamental, melancholic state of absence and thereby links indissolubly the appearance of the images on film with their extinguishment.
— Stephan Berg
Tue Greenfort’s art criticizes the current ecological reality with subtle humor and aesthetic commitment. He repeatedly cites selected aspects of avant-gardist art and thereby initiates a productive dialogue between various operating systems, for example those of the natural scientist and the art historian. Typical of Greenfort’s oeuvre is his sculpture Bonaqua Kondensationswürfel (2005) which, already in its title, directly recalls a Kondensationswürfel by Hans Haacke. Greenfort, however, undertakes a minimal but consequence-fraught reformulation: his sculpture is filled, not with condensing water, but with bottled mineral water from the Bonaqua label. Thereby the artist both announces his allegiance to the tradition of Minimal Art and loads it with ecological considerations. Bonaqua Kondensationswürfel reflects, for example, upon the differences between “first” and “second” nature. With his aesthetic, Greenfort refers repeatedly to the recycling art of Dan Peterman. This becomes clear in Producing 1 Kilogram of PET Plastic Requires 17.5 Kilograms of Water (2004), which already alludes to the works of the American artist with the explicitly named amounts of material. To be seen is a 1.5-liters mineral-water bottle which, under the influence of heat, has melted down to only 0.5 liter. The work demonstrates that the production of a non-returnable bottle requires more water than can be poured into it — this is as absurd as it gets.
— Text: Raimar Stange
The pictures of Beate Gütschow are confusing concatenations of reality and fiction. The black-and-white cityscapes of recent years, just like the colored landscape-depictions through which Gütschow has gained recognition since 2002, seem to be directly derived from reality, yet at the same time they result from complex digital manipulations. Whereas composite and cracked-wounded aspects were still apparent in the early works which deliberately quoted classical landscape painting, the large-scale urban perspectives blur the fine line between fiction and reality almost to the point of unrecognizability. The pathetic and apocalyptic pictures depict inhospitable urban worlds which Gütschow composes out of material which she herself has photographed, normally on journeys. Confidently shoving itself in front of the authentic and documentary aspect of the black-and-white photography is the pictorial invention of the artist, her remembrance and interpretation of events. The end-products are fascinatingly mute and non-localizable sceneries oscillating between wasteland and destruction. The sites are caught within a weightless void which conveys both final end and new beginning — vanquished metropolises combining the optimistic euphoria of a gigantic construction site with the traumatic stillness of a city in ruins.
— Martin Engler
The pictures of Beate Gütschow are confusing concatenations of reality and fiction. The black-and-white cityscapes of recent years, just like the colored landscape-depictions through which Gütschow has gained recognition since 2002, seem to be directly derived from reality, yet at the same time they result from complex digital manipulations. Whereas composite and cracked-wounded aspects were still apparent in the early works which deliberately quoted classical landscape painting, the large-scale urban perspectives blur the fine line between fiction and reality almost to the point of unrecognizability. The pathetic and apocalyptic pictures depict inhospitable urban worlds which Gütschow composes out of material which she herself has photographed, normally on journeys. Confidently shoving itself in front of the authentic and documentary aspect of the black-and-white photography is the pictorial invention of the artist, her remembrance and interpretation of events. The end-products are fascinatingly mute and non-localizable sceneries oscillating between wasteland and destruction. The sites are caught within a weightless void which conveys both final end and new beginning — vanquished metropolises combining the optimistic euphoria of a gigantic construction site with the traumatic stillness of a city in ruins.
— Martin Engler
When benches glide through the exhibition room in the moment that someone sits down on them, when fountains close off a space just like walls but suddenly open up a pathway, and when deliberately-directed currents of air tickle the nose of the visitor, then it is a matter of the art of Jeppe Hein. The Danish artist sets up interactive installations inside and outside the art-space — installations which at a first glance seem playful and friendly but which, upon closer inspection, reveal their critical dimension. The limitations inherent to interactivity are uncompromisingly exposed to view; in Jeppe Hein’s oeuvre, “participation” is just as restricted as in our supposed democracy. His installation Distance from 2004 may serve as an example of this strategy. At that time Hein had installed at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen a bowling lane which wormed its ways through all the levels of the building and which thereby broke through walls, invaded all the rooms of the Ludwig Forum and ultimately covered more than four hundred meters. Through his own movements, the visitor set in motion white plastic balls which then rolled down the pathway, turned somersaults along the way, took sharp curves and, arriving at their destination, resumed their journey when the next visitor came. But after the initial ignition, the visitor could do nothing more than follow and observe the balls. Not the person but the tiny sphere determines the path to be taken — self-assertive sovereignty is something quite different.
— Raimar Stange
Diango Hernández’ oeuvre is both political and poetical. His materials are found and secondhand antennas, telegraph poles, plastic chairs, the Internet, the political situation in his home country Cuba, or sculptural, acoustic arrangements of record players and loudspeakers.
His oeuvre is doubtlessly rooted in the Cuba of the nineteen-nineties after the demise of the Soviet Union and the accompanying breakdown of the nationalized Cuban economy. The artists of the Gabinete Ordo Amoris, which he co-founded, created objects and installations revealing the permanent scarcity of all essential commodities as both creative potential and scandalous poverty.
Hernández continues to be concerned with documentary arrangements which create parallel worlds through fiction and narration, abstraction and realism and which, in spite of their social involvement, preserve a specific melancholic beauty. Arising out of this latently illegal context between art and political demands are Hernández’ drawings, which up to today serve as the basis for his artistic work. His ironical-poetical collages derived from communism and everyday life join a collective past and private mythologies into large-scale installations which respond in like measure to the respective exhibition site and the artist’s own aesthetic cosmos.
— Martin Engler
The oeuvre of Andreas Hofer, which has increasingly developed along both painterly and installational lines, presents a stubbornly individualistic view of the world. It firmly refuses all categorizations in terms of form and contents even if Hofer, in the paintings, drawings, collages, installations and sculptures of his profound pictorial universe, turns his attention to cultural history in general, and repeatedly to the history of German thought and art in particular.
He often combines motifs and themes of Christian iconography and Romantic landscape painting with quotations of classical avant-garde movements. Hofer combines these motif- and form-engendering energies with a highly individual and controversial pictorial language, for example that of the Third Reich, so as to address the ideological perversion of art by the National Socialists. But his oeuvre also focuses on the dark sides of popular American culture such as Charles Manson, B-movies and trashy superheroes. In Trans Time (2006) he constructed a giant model of the famous Mount Rushmore but replaced the busts of four American presidents with representations of well-known Hollywood divas; moreover, he designed the interior space of the mountain as a theme park for his painting.
— Frank-Thorsten Moll
Buildings serve as the models for Sabine Hornig’s sculptures, which function like trompe-l’oeils. Interventions — such as a seemingly authentic bath towel hanging over a balcony which, as in prefabricated-concrete buildings, is roughly plastered, closed and gray — characterize a sculpture as representation. This type of element works against the authenticity of pure form as well as against Minimalist unity; it creates a picture resembling a monochromatic color-field which is brought out of balance by a trace of yellow paint.
Whereas artists such as Carl Andre use self-referential, authentic materials, Sabine Hornig undermines this autonomy just as she breaks apart the closed unity of abstract sculptures: a wall is artificially reproduced with the help of stones made from newspaper. The illusions become loaded with emotion when the architectural references — for example the entrance to a school — make reference to the German past. The phenomenological perception is subverted, and the pretended transparency of the photographs accordingly proves to be just as deceptive as the spaces which cannot be entered.
Hornig proceeds like a taxidermist, but the originals are simply models which she imperceptibly shifts and carries far away. The powerful morbidity of the works arises out of their fragmentary nature, through their separation from real objects and loss of social contextuality. Displaced in this way, the artificial objects in the exhibition rooms take on the appearance of hunting trophies.
— Caroline Käding
Sergej Jensen’s art comprises paintings, films, music, and installations, with a central focus on painting. Paint is used, if at all, only sparingly and without expressive gestures; instead it is even subsequently removed, inasmuch as signs and geometrical forms are bleached into the previously colored pictorial surface, which is also manipulated by threads, pieces of knitting or sewn-together scraps of cloth. The result is that these abstract, Minimalist compositions engender various associations. Objects are hinted at through negative forms, landscapes may be read — as if accidentally — out of the traces left by the artistic treatment, and linear structures recall political symbols.
The handling of materials shows an almost feminine form of domestic work which is suggested, not only by the handcrafted character of the paintings, but also by their medium size. This aesthetic also underlies Jensen’s installations involving rugs and furnishings, where the pictures serve to decorate the domestic surroundings. The cold white cube is replaced by the intimate cabinet. Not only in this way does the ironic attitude of the artist emerge, but also in his manner of undermining the aura of traditional painting without rendering the painting totally devoid of this quality. Each work is created with a minimum of effort, simple material is used, and the work process is stopped after only a few steps. In spite of its formal severity, however, this modest outcome exudes ease and playfulness.
— Caroline Käding
The signs and clichés that Franka Kaßner uses in her installations and films are politically charged with “national” energies; they have a polarizing effect and summon mixed emotions. The artist, who lives in Munich, reflects on the identity-giving function of such “symbols for Germany” as the black-red-golden flag, the national anthem, and the federal eagle as well as other insignia of the nation, its traditions, and state constitutions since the 1920s. Kaßner is unafraid to carry out stagings that persist for a while in the style of radical rightists: with shaven head, parachutist-boots, and black clothing, she issued corresponding signals and embodied a national attitude in a sort of long-term performance. What appears at first to be blind affirmation is revealed on close inspection to be a mimicry that examines more deeply the promises of “power to the people.” Having grown up in the GDR, the artist also aims at the political contradictions of socialism in its East-German manifestation and, not least of all, at its latent affinity with National Socialism. One of her installations displays a huge grandstand for the appearances of Honecker and associates. Empty pathos and a stuffy, petit-bourgeois atmosphere mark the site's design, that Kaßner transforms into the setting for a well-known GDR children’s song: Wenn Mutti früh zur Arbeit geht (When Mommy Goes Early to Work). The artist sings with a high-pitched, child’s voice and disavows the ideological double standard by altering the text. Again and again, Kaßner addresses the question as to the private and political meaning of national identity, repudiating and undermining any simple, unambiguous answers.
— Susanne Meyer-Büser
In his installations often resembling the experimental, Christoph Keller uses the discursive possibilities of art to investigate the science and its utopias. The Cloudbuster-Project (2003) involves reenactments of Wilhelm Reich’s experiments for influencing the atmosphere with orgone energy. In Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001) and Archives as Objects as Monument s (2000), Keller focuses upon the archeology of scientific film, impossibility of objective documentation, and the problem of the archival urge to order comprehensive knowledge. In spite of all methodological objectivity, a selective and deliberate design is always at work here. In Expedition-Bus and Shaman-Travel (2002), a mirrored camping bus for research trips, the ethnographic viewpoint of science is exposed as a projection of its own culture. The viewer is drawn into the installation and becomes a field investigator, for Keller is ultimately concerned with linking methods and procedures of scientific work with a spatial but also psychological-physical experiencie of art. Keller is working on themes at the frontiers of science, such as the connection between hypnosis and cinematography (Hypnosis-Film-Project [2006]). In The Chemtrails Phenomenon (2006) and The Whole Earth (2007), the theme is conspiracy theories in the Internet, which as “scientific constructs” are likewise expressions of a certain state of consciousness in society.
— Hilke Wagner
Annette Kelm’s works are characterized by a reflective and conceptual handling of the medium of photography. Often structured as a series, they conduct a profound investigation into the status of this medium as a visual representational system which produces ambivalent aesthetic symbols. Meaning arises in particular there where formal structure and the level of contents are combined. Although Kelm’s photographs present reduced arrangements of reality, they evince a high degree of eloquence and seem to be loaded with various connotations. The clarity which they supposedly possess is accordingly a lucidity in relation to the represented objects. The stories which are linked to these objects must, on the other hand, be explored by the viewer himself. Annette Kelm plays with the conventions of genres such as the still life, the portrait, and advertising photography; she replaces their meticulousness with succinctness or subtle alienation. Her photographs present objects rich in relationships as well as carefully arranged poses, but they remain silent with regard to the contexts out of which these pictures have arisen. Even in the case of motifs which are structured as a series, it is first when the viewer compares the individual images that, in the interplay between difference and repetition, there emerges the actual significance of that which is represented.
— Vanessa Joan Müller
His spectacular works have given Alexander Laner the reputation of being an “action artist.” He sees himself, however, as a classical sculptor who is concerned with sculpture in a wider sense. Trained as a stonemason and a producer of signs and advertisements, he used freight containers in 2002 with Akademie , his graduation project, to reproduce the building of the Munich Art Academy on a scale of 1:2. From this project, which could only be seen for five hours, there remains only a single photo, a situation which emphasizes the ephemeral character of many of the artist’s works. Laner’s versatility was demonstrated a year later when, in his debut exhibition, he made public the restoration of his Mercedes coupé. Together with a Polish welder he worked on his automobile in the large hall of the Art Academy and thereby drew attention, not only to the process-related aspect of his work, but also to the communication between artist and craftsman. Thus social, political or even economic themes and interpretations play an important subsidiary role in the art of Alexander Laner. In all his works, improvisation is an important formal element, so that they often take on the charming ease of chance happening. Recent works such as Der Plattenspieler , in which a powerful motor drives a tiny record player and causes a record with music by Chopin to be played, demonstrate a fascinating disproportion between effort and outcome which, in general, imbues his works with a cheerful yet distressing character.
— Frank-Thorsten Moll
With his video installations, Jan Mancuska investigates our perception of space and time. In the installation A Gap , for instance, the plot unfolds upon four separate monitors. Through slight alternations, the artist is able to confuse the viewer, inasmuch as it becomes difficult to define clearly the cause and effect of that which is seen. With this video installation, Mancuska addresses the question of perception and comprehension which is here closely connected to space. Only when the viewer gradually turns his attention to the individual monitors does the plot become clear to him in such a way that he also experiences the process of understanding in spatial terms.
In addition to video installations, Mancuska creates objects with which we are familiar in daily life, but which are composed of materials from other everyday objects: a cup out of sugar cubes, a hen out of wire and shuttlecocks, a washbasin out of soap or a potato made from a sponge. In a poetical and ironical manner, the artist achieves the strange transformation of the everyday into the artistic. The simplicity of his works offers the viewer a space for making associations. With his works, Jan Mancuska stands in relation to the Conceptual Art which is linked to the Eastern European tradition.
— Mirka Knauf
Who’s that guy? Proceeding from the smurf past the omniscient narrator, whining infant, and disillusioned cowboy all the way to the demonic seducer, television preacher, secret agent or science-fiction hero, Bjørn Melhus not only slips into dozens of crazy, glaringly overdrawn roles during his films and videos but also embodies these protagonists to such a degree that the identity of the artist behind his assumed figures becomes blurred almost to the point of unrecognizability. He characterizes himself as a storyteller, and his loops and video settings almost always revolve around the phenomena of a mass culture whose aesthetic depths he fathoms with both pleasure and precision. Melhus belongs to that generation whose defining influence came from television, and the formats and mechanisms of that medium constitute an inexhaustible reservoir for his enormously entertaining, highly complex pastiches. Collages of language and sound, encoded in terms of popular culture, are mixed with an artificially exaggerated pictorial world deriving its inspiration from an amalgam of television sermon, soap opera, series kitsch and space opera, and thereby maintaining a perfect equilibrium between affective-affirmative assimilation and a disquieting strangeness.
— Stephan Berg
Simon Dybbroe Møller works quite intently in a neo-conceptional tradition. Like such contemporaries of his as Jeppe Hein, Christine Würmell and Elke Marhöfer, he makes reference with his still young oeuvre to the art of the nineteen-sixties, whose conceptional strategies he translates into narratives which are both sentimental and analytical. A typical example is Møller’s installation at the Berlin Artforum in 2004. At that fair he set up a stand which precisely displayed his view of the problem of the avant-garde: Møller sawed a piece of the wall from the stand so that it tilted into the interior space. This Gordon-Matta-Clark quotation opened a “window,” as it were, into the otherwise closed “white cell” of the artistic space. In addition, pieces of the sawed-out wood served as a plinth which remained empty — reflection was thereby given to the function of the art-fair stand in a manner that was critical of the market. The furniture of the stand also belonged to the installation: the chairs played upon the Zig-Zag Chair of Gerrit Rietveld, while the table referred to the 710 Quaderna table of the Italian design office Superstudio. Møller not only positioned himself as a service-provider for his gallery, but he also addressed questions as to the worth of avant-garde ideologies and the relevance of their aesthetic designs.
— Raimar Stange
Jonathan Monk’s works function primarily through the structure of repetition, the loop and reproduction. Today Is Just a Copy of Yesterday presents a slide carousel containing a work by Sol LeWitt which has been duplicated onto slides forty times, and in the process has faded into unrecognizability. The title of the work can thereby be understood as an ironical and precise self-description of the artist’s entire oeuvre. Monk subjects the Minimal and especially the Conceptual Art of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, from Alighiero e Boetti to John Baldessari and from Bas Jan Ader to Ed Ruscha, to seemingly casual acts of ambiguous appropriations and duplicating registrations. He thereby points up the fundamental importance of this art, just as at the same time he undermines its normative pretensions through deliberate subjectivisms. Thus the mirror of this oeuvre fragments, not only the phantasm of the majestic aura of authorship, but also the prejudice that repetitions are boring because they reproduce only that with which we are already familiar. Monk shows us how the new arises through the appropriation of the old, and at no point does he conceal — God be praised! — how much pleasure this brings.
— Stephan Berg
Henrik Olesen focuses in his collages, sculptures, and installations on the arrangement and regulation of historical, cultural, and political identities. His investigations take as their point of departure current and past material from architectural and industrial history, the administration of justice and punishment, the geographical and demographic distribution of capital, the natural sciences, and art history. He uses manipulation and contextual shifts to thematize the criminalization, stigmatization, and repression of homosexuality. His works are related in formal terms to the reduced vocabulary of Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. According to the specific context, there can be limited interventions in the exhibition architecture which irritate the visitor’s customary sense of space. This spatial and sculptural procedure is confronted with collages or collections of material which are preceded by intensive research in the Internet. Spatial installations are created like the one in the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001, where Olesen, besides intervening in the pre-existing architecture, displayed hundreds of computer prints. Their various visual and textual levels demonstrated the consequences of the legal restrictions of homosexual identity with respect to cultural particularities and the current legal situation by means of pictorial documentation from around the world.
— Gabriele Sand
The destabilization of the structures of order and logic is part of the aesthetic master plan pursued by Kirsten Pieroth. Thus the artist, who lives in Berlin, quickly transfers a Kreuzberger Pfütze (Kreuzberg Puddle, 2001) from a more “trashy” district of the city to the chic Berlin-Mitte, where she presents it in an exhibition space which is fittingly called Sparwasser HQ (Saved Water Headquarters). Or, also in 2001, she travels through Copenhagen on her bicycle in such a manner that she sits in reverse and then pedals backwards, but nevertheless moves in the “correct” direction. In a recent work group, Pieroth focuses upon the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, for instance in the work Letter to an Inventor (2003), in which she takes Edison’s written refusal of a invitation to a dinner party as the point of departure for a complex investigation. The problem is formulated as follows: Is the excuse for the refusal which Edison makes in the letter based on fact or freely invented? Edison was namely well-known for his dislike of such dinner parties. Pieroth asks the great-grandson of the inventor concerning the matter, but also contacts a scientific society which is dedicated to his work. Moreover, she attempts to register with the patent office the excuse that “he is otherwise engaged,” a pretext which long ago became a classic prevarication. The attempt is unsuccessful, an outcome which is then documented in the exhibited correspondence. Here the artist addresses questions concerning the authenticity of biographies as well as the truthfulness of language.
— Raimar Stange
Peter Piller has been collecting for years with great success. The objects of his gathering-frenzy are pictures from various, more-or-less public sources: daily newspapers, obscure Internet forums or professional pictorial legacies. His odd and frightening findings from German everyday life are compiled and condensed, then transferred into a rigid archival structure. The labels of the various collection areas already formulate a multi-layered insight into the idiosyncrasies of our present era. Between series such as in Löcher blacken (men beside opened sewer covers), durchschnittene Einweihungsbänder (men with scissors behind dedicatory ribbons), Deko + Munition (bullets as decorative accessories) or Liegeplatz (places where unexploded shells have been found), there are revealed the structures of a culture of representation which is both intimate and collective. To the degree which Peter Piller’s archive proliferates further, it thereby becomes possible to comprehend a phenomenology of everyday life which, oscillating between the comedy of endless repetition and the ritualization of the trivial, creates a familiar yet foreign image of our present era.
Along the border zones of collection and documentation, sociology and popular culture, Piller develops, for each new exhibition context, restagings of his archive which are related to the pictorial tableaus of Aby Warburg and which, moreover, display a specific narrative potential.
— Martin Engler
Julius Popp’s installations are situated upon a complex field of interaction between science and art. Their theme is the production of images and comprehension of the world by means of autonomous machines transforming manifold normative processes into simple relationships between action and reaction. In micro-spheres , sixteen robots enter into a limited interaction with the exhibition visitors which is unexpectedly fraught with consequences: the approximately knee-high spheres possess one single capability, namely that of rolling automatically to the center of the space available to them. As long as the spheres remain alone and undisturbed, they form static, geometric patterns. But as soon as a “foreign” element enters the room, a wavelike chain reaction is set in motion and the space is reorganized — a highly poetic image for our environment that is constantly involved in transformative and organizational processes, as well as for the underlying principal of cause and effect.
Similarly revolving around complexity and the interdependence of environment and observer is the work Bitfall , in which a computer program translates words into sequences of water drops. The words, which have been selected from the Internet according to their importance, pour from the ceiling as a cascade of information and are already dispersed in the very moment of their creation. The process of perceiving, comprehending and interpreting the information encoded in these detached words is intelligibly depicted in all its openness and complexity by this ephemeral trial arrangement.
— Martin Engler
Julian Rosefeldt’s film work reveals a clear development from a historical-documentary attitude to a lavish theatrical presentation. Whereas in Stadt im Verborgenen (1994) and Detonation Deutschland (1996) he systematically examined the interface between ideology, architecture and power, the works beginning with Global Soap (2001) instead deliberately dispense with ideological clarity and aim at a complex staging of the rituals and structures of our everyday life. Particularly in the film installations Asylum (2001/02) and Trilogy of Failure (2004), the artist utilizes an exuberant, almost baroque pictorial language which bathes his scenes in a calculatedly surreal light. The exaggerated artificiality with which the artist conducts his investigations of the absurd shallows of our reality causes the profound truths lying behind the spectacle to emerge all the more clearly. Thus Asylum focuses on our clichés about foreigners; for example, Rosefeldt presents in nine “tableaux vivants” Chinese fast-food cooks in a monkey cage, or Moslem cleaning ladies in a cactus house. It is precisely its abandonment of political correctness and its play with the vocabularies of kitsch, inappropriateness and exaggeration which guarantees the succinct impact of this work. In the best sense of the words, the work proves what it really means to distort the world to the point of recognition.
— Stephan Berg
The point of departure for the complex installations of Daniel Roth are places which actually exist in landscapes, institutions or companies, and in which this seeker and teller of stories finds signs of a second level of reality, a fantastic inner dimension. They are absurd connections and parallel actions which the artist copies down as meandering, often faltering and disappearing paths. Subterranean lakes, tunnel systems, concealed fortifications, false floors and secret spaces are the scenes of conspiracies whose actual subject never becomes apparent to the viewer, but whose explosiveness he surmises through the “centrifugal force” of the arrangements. Roth works above all with drawings-on paper, directly on the wall, or on wooden supports with white primer and sanded edges-but also with objects, photographs and videos. This collection of found objects and signs, establishing bizarre lines of connection across the entire globe, is presented in frames or display cases, just as in natural history museums. Daniel Roth’s drawings consist solely of outlines and resemble scientific studies in their objectivity and precision. It seems as if the hand of the artist, as Harald Klingelhöller puts it, “has traced out in a slow and even tempo an invisible plan beneath the drawing.”
— Susanne Meyer-Büser
The video installations of the artistic duo RothStauffenberg involve the viewer, whose sense experiences they seek to stimulate. In Sarajevo , for example, various genres such as the documentary, feature film, and animation are brought into mutual relation. RothStauffenberg’s oeuvre lives from the deconstruction of narrative and filmic material. Fictional and documentary elements are interwoven in so clever a manner that the viewer begins to doubt the truthfulness of the supposed documentation being presented to him. This impression is heightened by the merging of the beginning and end of what is shown — these cannot be clearly recognized.
Time as well as beginning and end are the subject of the work Blackbox , an instrument with a recording time of fifteen minutes and a clearly recognizable beginning and end of its registration. Different accidents and mishaps are presented to the viewer. First the sound may be heard, then a text is read, and finally complex film sequences are shown. In this work, the artists deliberately factor into their calculation the urge of the viewer to distill truth from what he sees and hears. Thus the installation confronts us with the limits of our ability to distinguish between the real and the fictional and to construct a coherent narrative.
— Mirka Knauf
A liberating leitmotif for the sculptor Michael Sailstorfer runs as follows: “Aggressivity towards material and viewer.” This means that the potential for straightness and directness should be realized without compromise and digressive theoretical intensifications. Created out of this perspective are works which have a direct connection to the present and which were earlier linked especially to the fulfillment of longings so as to possess an intimate as well as a global dimension. Thus pragmatic realizations and bold shifts of context also characterize Sailstorfer’s art, which first summons up a promising euphoria only to veer round into tragedy, even though the original idea was extremely practical - but at the same time absurd ( Sternschnuppe 2002).
At the moment, his interest is focused on the “character study” of sculpture. With questions such as “What can be considered to be sculpture?” and “How do you create an object by removing material?” Sailstorfer touches upon aspects of spatial extension which induce him to move beyond the borders of a sculpture that is bound to the human body. He values smell, noise and light as suitable materials which, because of their quality of spreading out in three dimensions, very definitely fulfill the requirements for sculptural status and which, in view of their invasive character, cannot be ignored. That also solves his problem as to how, in the small sculpture consisting of car tires entitled Zeit ist keine Autobahn (2006), an impressive presence can be attained.
— Eveline Bernasconi
Florian Slotawa’s sculptural arrangements and photographs all involve process. The sculptures and installations created out of household goods and furniture of diverse provenance are reminiscences of respective phases in the life of the artist. His Besitzarbeiten are, just like the works which thematize his personal environment, narrational and site-specific — even when he exhibits them in a museum, he takes possession of the premises.
Slotawa’s oeuvre acquires an additional dimension through the transformation of objects and spaces. At the end of the nineteen-nineties for the photo series Hotelarbeiten , he used the purely functional furnishings in hotel rooms to build personal refuges for himself. The traces of wear and tear along with the objects in the rooms provide an intimation of the previous presence of countless anonymous guests. The past flows into the present of the sculptures, which transform into something familiar – if only temporarily – that foreignness which is the customary quality of hotel rooms: before the break of day, Slotawa returns the rooms to their original state. In his works, the artist sounds out the borders between the personal and the anonymous, items of practical use and art, private and public space. The individual components appear like relics of specific acts. In spite of the open process of the work, their aesthetic appearance proves to be traditional in its formal severity: the works always constitute closed and complete unities, balanced in their proportions and arranged with care.
— Caroline Käding
In his conceptual works involving photography, video, and texts, Sean Snyder traces the significance and degree of concretization inherent to informational contents. In both the global dimensions of architecture and the domains of urban and media spaces, the artist identifies social, ideological, and economic structures and typologies which he uncovers in visual material derived from various sources and circulating throughout the world and which he also discovers in international transfers of architecture. He deciphers the diffusion of codes, representational patterns and ideologies that constitute the visual and text-based matrix of the points of reference.
For The Site (2004/05) the artist analyzed visual and textual data upon the discovery of Saddam Hussein in his hiding-place which was disseminated by the media. He was interested in two aspects: first, visual photographic evidence which actually possesses no significance but which, secondly, manifests a fundamentally open potentiality of meaning that makes it possible to attribute newsworthiness to the material. Above all, it is the transparency of the pictures which reveals the context-defined, sense-engendering imposition of meaning onto them from outside.
Modern architecture and urban planning are the focus of the investigations in Brasilia (2000) and Bucharest/Pyongyang (2000–2004). Through the imposition and importation of ideological and stylistic typologies, the urban surroundings function as shaping narrative and embody both transformational processes and representational patterns.
— Eveline Bernasconi
Processes of transformation are the fundamental characteristic of the conceptual art of Simon Starling; as a rule, he presents to the viewer the end-product of a long process of labor. The process-related aspect, on the other hand, lies in the typically narrational dimension which serves as the basis for the creation of sculptures and installations representing the physical equivalent of mental processes. As is the case for the novelist, it is irrelevant to Starling whether or not the recounted stories are true. The artist is concerned primarily with the potential alterability and representation of cyclical structures, as well as with the leveling and criticizing of utilitarian implications through strategies involving detours. He makes use of the domains of technology, nature, economy, and society, for example in Shed/Boat/Shed (Mobile Architecture 2) (2005), which symbolizes the transformation of a simple wooden shed into a traditional boat and then back into a hut, and thereby thematizes mass production, the pressures of acceleration, global mobility, and monocultures. Whereas in that work a boat trip on the Rhine provides the narrative continuity, in wilhelm noack ohg (2006) a historical reference comes to the fore: winding along the model of a circular metal staircase is a long roll of film which documents the creation of the staircase and simultaneously sets this process against the political and cultural background of the company’s history.
— Eveline Bernasconi
Mathilde ter Heijne works primarily with installations and video art. The scenes of her video installations are marked by conflicts, unrest and violence just as we know them from the daily news, but also from everyday life. She makes corresponding choices for the sources for her works. She prefers to use excerpts from the media such as news reports, or elements from feature films, especially romantic films. The link between what appears at first glance to be a group of such utterly contrasting sources lies in the catastrophe per se which becomes noticeable through ter Heijne’s artistic treatment. She mixes the original commentary from documentaries with dialogues from feature films and thereby merges the levels of reality and fiction. The result is a collage of text and documentary film which has its own peculiar narrative structure. Ter Heijne looks for the points of contact between, on the one hand, the religious and national conflicts which are conveyed daily by the media and, on the other, conflicts arising out of personal relationships. In this endeavor she uses — just as do the media — the uncompromising impact of images.
Ter Heijne appears in her works, not just as artist, but also as director, actress and, ever since 2000, as a double in the shape of a life-sized doll.
— Mirka Knauf
The twin brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias focus their works on the themes of cultural identity and geographical origin. Their work cycle Come and See before the Tourist Will Do – the Mystery of Transylvania turns its attention to the mythical landscape of Romania in which the two spent their childhood until emigrating to Germany in 1985. The twins apply an autobiographical perspective to random quotations from the extensive repertoire of numerous vampire films and Transylvanian customs which they use, along with ornamental fragments from books of traditional embroidery, as the models for unusual, large-scale woodcuts. Traditional figural motifs are abstracted and become the basis for reduced graphical-ornamental images which are combined with typography. In the encounter with their Transylvanian heritage, Gert and Uwe Tobias develop a kaleidoscope of folkloristic homeland-motifs and fearsome horror-scenarios. Their view of a historical, geographical and cultural system that is to be transferred into a personal pictorial language is the point of departure and experimental field for an investigation of identity and transference, of personal mythology and its disenchantment. Their artistic oeuvre extends from conceptual projects and installations past typewriter drawings, collages and sculptures all the way to their favorite medium of woodcuts.
— Gabriele Sand
That their products reveal something about the nature of human beings is the initial thesis of Oliver van den Berg, who has become known for his objects based upon models of such technical equipment as radar, flight-recorders, or planetarium projectors. They have a futuristic, technoid appearance but are reduced to their perfect surfaces, robbed of their functions and returned to a prototypical status. Mostly made of wood, the sculptural material par excellence, and standing in anachronistic contradiction to the material and function of their shiny technical models, these sculptures pursue utopias of progress to the point of absurdity and simultaneously address the issue of original versus copy. This artistic assimilation and reduction to an aesthetic quality makes possible an interesting act of reflection, for every technical invention is also the projection of human dreams and inadequacies. In this sense, the works of Oliver van den Berg may be situated in the tradition of man-machine analogies. Proceeding from his installation Mikros (2006), in the current work cameras made out of pine-wood take possession of the exhibition space as relics of an oversized press conference. The enormous proliferation of tables, struts, and recording devices stands in stark contrast, however, to the individual execution: each object is unique yet interchangeable.
— Hilke Wagner
The aspect of transience seems to be a conceptual characteristic of Gabriel Vormstein’s artistic oeuvre. The materiality of his works is marked by an aspect of miserableness when he chooses to paint on newspaper or inserts into his installations the branches and wood he has gathered.
His paintings are created upon the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Vormstein transforms the profane, everyday material of newspaper into poetical, melancholic pictures. The colored surfaces engender painterly images whose diverse motifs give rise to manifold relationships. There are floral and figural representations, but also abstract forms. With these pictures, Vormstein establishes a link to the history of European art, especially to the Viennese painters at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. In a subtle monopolization which is also an investigation of past styles, he develops a personal artistic language which, through its choice of material, retains the character of a sketch. The recourse to the arte povera of the nineteen-sixties is also evident in his installational works. Newspaper pictures are often integrated and combined with branches, wire, adhesive tape, and other materials. In his works, Vormstein aims at a modern synthesis connecting personal interests and influences with historical and cultural references.
— Gabriele Sand
Amelie von Wulffen uses private and published photographs as initial material for her works. A portion of the pictures were taken from her family album and show the parental home and a grandmother in various phases of her life; to be seen on other pictures are idols from the nineteen-seventies, for example the actor John Travolta or the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The illustrated persons and surroundings interconnect the individual works less in a thematic than in a highly atmospheric manner. The photos come from the childhood- and teenage-years of the artist, who was born in 1966, and they mirror aspects of pubescent infatuation and awakening political awareness as she grows to adulthood. Amelie von Wulffen uses the forms of traditional reportorial media; she forms collages from the set pieces of her photographic material and integrates them into roughly painted, futuristic architectural elements. Alongside the private “material of remembrance,” fashion shots and historical architectural photographs are taken from magazines and utilized. “Dreams of modern living” are cut up and freshly inserted into painted environments; they are destroyed, extended or reworked by the brushstrokes. Amelie von Wulffen pursues this deconstruction of set pieces in a literally “sleepwalking” manner, so that her allusive pictorial spaces engender dramatic and poetic scenarios of the last days of the world.
— Susanne Meyer-Büser
With meticulous precision, Haegue Yang investigates conditions inherent to a feeling of identity and their constituent factors. Using herself as an example for her research — on the one hand in her situation as a South Korean “foreigner,” on the other hand as an artist — she examines through thematic self-reflections the disposition of artistic existence and human autonomy. In this endeavor, she moves primarily along the outskirts of secure emotional areas, and accordingly her works typically touch upon motifs such as suppression, distraction (compare Suppression and Distraction , 2007), the absence of certainties, the private sphere, or the state of otherness. She draws her expressive power out of the emphasis given to “non-” and intermediate spaces, to concealed aspects, and to silence, as well as out of the peculiar combination of unimportant aspects with things which are often objects of relatively little value such as electric fans, light bulbs, bookshelves, venetian blinds, and origami paper, but which in their omnipresence and concomitant familiarity offer heterogeneous surroundings to the senses ( Series of Vulnerable Arrangements — Blind Room , 2006). There are perceptions of heat, moisture, odor, wind, and light which — as Haegue Yang concludes — are just as physically and sociologically determined as is our self-awareness. She discovers in fragmentariness and brittleness the possibility of developing mental states of anarchical self-determination and faithfulness to oneself, poetical actions, and freedom.
— Eveline Bernasconi
In his photographs Tobias Zielony describes the public life of youths in high-congestion areas like the Knowle West district in Bristol, the prefabricated-concrete housing areas in Halle-Neustadt, or the Quartiers Nord in Marseille. He is interested less in the documentation of living conditions than in the depiction of the lounging and posing of youths in public spaces. He portrays urban spaces in which social life is played out between parking garages, supermarkets and empty lots. Zielony is fascinated by what he calls “this fully casual form of social interaction.” He depicts life in the border areas of urban reality, in socially sanctioned sites of exclusion which, far removed from all the utopias conceived by urban planners, have developed into a sort of autonomous city within the city. These investigations into urban subculture are mirrored in his book of photos Behind the Block (2004). Zielony orients himself in terms of the aesthetic of documentary photography and thereby draws in his series of color photos a forceful picture of a generation deemed to be “lost.” Likewise in the project Big Sexyland (2005), his theme is a certain social reality of youths. In a reportorial style, black-and-white photographs show young men in a porno cinema and an adjacent park. They are Germans, but also youths from Rumania, Bulgaria and Poland, who sell themselves for sex to earn money to buy drugs or simply in order to survive.
— Gabriele Sand
It is above all his investigation of the medium of drawing which, alongside installations, video works and sculptures, has brought recognition to the oeuvre of Ralf Ziervogel. Giant panoramic drawings prevent the viewer from achieving an overview because of the sheer amount of visual information. Viewed from a distance, their proliferation captivates through motifs and tiny details which are at first glance scarcely perceptible and which convey the impression of a giant pattern. They seem like a combination of a modern version of the baroque fantasies of hell and infernal punishment which fill in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch with the cinematographic worlds of splatter videos and the films of Quentin Tarantino. Meandering men, women, children, and animals are intertwined. The representations of sodomy, penetration and torture reveal the dark depths of human obsession. One scene engenders a second and is itself derived from a third, so that there emerges an immanent system which, in the exuberantly cruel sensuality of destruction and vandalism, negates each and every moral standard. The presentation of the drawings can deliberately take on an installational character. Thus the drawings of the tripartite work ENDENEU (Das eidgenössische Unterbewusstsein) from 2006 are situated upon the floor in red-painted surroundings, or the over-six-meters-high works “Immobilie” and Kommste mit ins Cookies (2004) are hung directly from the ceiling, so that the works are simultaneously spatial sculpture and drawing.
— Gabriele Sand
Born in Peru and now residing in Berlin, David Zink Yi investigates the problematic fields of identity, origin and social role in the age of postmodernism. Of obvious importance here is not only the status of the artist, but also his tradition and origin. These precise aspects animate, for example, his exhibition „Geschlossene Kurve, bei der für jeden Punkt die Summe der Entfernungen zu zwei gegebenen Punkten konstant ist. Auslassung insbesondere inmitten von etwas” (2006). Here Zink Yi focuses upon the field of interaction between art and craft as well as between modernism and tradition. In the middle of a gallery stands a wooden form resembling an oversized barrel. The sculpture is made out of wood from Peru, in a technique which Zink Yi learned from a Peruvian cooper who himself was trained by the artist’s grandfather. A photograph likewise displayed in the room shows how a wooden barrel is constructed in his grandfather’s firm. The craft of barrel-building is thereby shifted into an artistic technique for creating an abstract object. Moreover, the artist and his grandfather enter into a belated dialogue blurring the borders between traditional craft and current art.
— Raimar Stange
The paintings and installations of Thomas Zipp leave strange impressions. With his stubbornly maintained, clearly circumscribed areas of interest such as atomic fission, England or historical personalities, he could stand in the artistic tradition of individual mythologies. His investigations are directed towards stories, myths and utopias of modernism, which he converts into a present context. Functioning as means for creating distance to the historical references are humor and irony as well as cryptic messages from symbols which decline any pragmatic translation and lead to moments of oscillation between a historical tribute and visionary images. In this characteristic, gloomy opacity lies the power of attraction radiated by his art.
Zipp frequently composes his pictorial program as stagelike installations consisting of painting, sculptural objects, as well as drawings and the collages that are typical of modernism, whereby these last two as a rule function as constitutive components and transport hinting references. His overpowering panoramas with inhospitable landscapes and brooding horizons are liberatingly surreal. Their skies are often either settings for energetic cloud formations or figured graphic patterns, and they are sometimes abstract, checked backgrounds. Delicate indexings, lines, and heads with speech bubbles transfer the viewer to an extraterrestrial vantage-point; he is caught, so to speak, in the moment of flying towards our planet and our cultural history.
— Eveline Bernasconi |
