germanyberlin

Thomas Demand, Studio, 1997, C-Print / Diasec, 183,5 x 349,5 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

Thomas Demand, Büro / Office, 1995, C-Print / Diasec, 183,5 x 240 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

Thomas Demand, Treppenhaus / Staircase, 1995, C-Print / Diasec, 150 x 118 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

Thomas Demand, Badezimmer / Bathroom, 1997, C-Print / Diasec, 160 x 122 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Thomas Demand, Klause IV / Tavern IV, 2006, C-Print / Diasec, 103 x 68 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Neue Nationalgalerie
Potsdamer Straße 50
+49-(0)30-266 42 4510
Berlin
Thomas Demand
National Gallery
September 18, 2009-
January 17, 2010

Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin devotes a comprehensive solo show to one of the internationally most influential artists of our time: Thomas Demand. It is so far the largest presentation of his work in this country. However, the exhibition National Gallery is not designed as an overall retrospective but it is firmly dedicated to only one subject, which is perhaps the most important in Demand's multi-facetted oeuvre: Germany.

Appropriately timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany, Thomas Demand's pictures offer a retrospective of Germany's recent history. The artist's works present well-known photographs used extensively by the media in a totally new light. Apart from politically relevant subjects, the exhibition will also include images of everyday life. Whilst working with photography as a medium, Thomas Demand does not see himself as a photographer in the true sense of the word. He lives and works in Berlin and is one of the most internationally renowned and influential artists of our time.

About 40 works by the artist are on display in the glass hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie built by Mies van der Rohe. There is hardly a location which is more suitable to convey to the beholder the panorama of a nation's history than the large glass hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie, which is not only regarded as an incunabulum of post-war architecture but also as a symbol for the self-image of the Federal Republic of Germany at the former border between East and West. The exceptional exhibition architecture of the firm, Caruso St. John, London, forms an ideal link between Demand's works and Mies van der Rohe's bright hall.

Each picture in the exhibition is accompanied by a specific caption written by Botho Strauss which does not so much explain or define Demand's work but rather creates a space between the pictures and the texts to allow new versions of interpretation.

Demand’s works are exhibited at entry points to the glass-walled building designed by Mies van der Rohes. An installation has been purpose-built specifically for the exhibition, using luxury drapery and a hidden “support structure” — the artist’s works seem to be floating on the walls and in the newly designed textile rooms. The fabric architecture, which is an integral part of the exhibition, has been created by Thomas Demand in collaboration with the exhibition architects, Adam Caruso and Peter St John (Caruso St John Architects, London).

The Danish company, Kvadrat, Europe’s leading manufacturer of contemporary and innovative textiles, is supporting the exhibition by providing elaborate fabric architecture. Almost five kilometres (4.720 running metres) of the fabric, “Tonica”, made from 10 percent new wool is being used in the exhibition. The fabric is displayed in four colours, two shades of grey, a brown and a bright yellow. One of the grey shades and the bright yellow have been specially developed for the exhibition.

With regard to the event, Thomas Demand says, “The National Gallery building is a challenge — and, at the same time, has such unique textures that it’s a dream to hold an exhibition there. However, the transparency of the building is often misunderstood: being able to see through a room doesn’t always give you the best
view of things — so we’ve kept the lucidity of the architecture, but broken up the horizontal view through the room with walls made from draperies. The reason we chose Kvadrat drapery for the textile architecture is mainly because of the vibrancy of the processed new wool in ‘Tonica’. The ‘Tonica’ colouring is also classic
yet modern. The material reminds me of an oversized suit by Joseph Beuys, or of something homely. That’s an interesting contradiction based on the scale of our intervention."

A weekly series of lectures conceived by the artist and entitled How German is it? is running in parallel with the exhibition; it is sponsored by the cultural foundation of the Federal Government. In the series, artists, politicians, scientists, economists and others will talk about an aspect of German culture, society and history, each time taking one of Thomas Demand's works as the starting point.

Thomas Demand was born in 1964 in Munich and studied at the Art Academy in Düsselorf and at Goldsmiths’ College in London. Beside participating in numerous international group shows, from the mid-1990s on his work was also presented in a number of solo shows, for example, at Sprüth Magers London (2008), in the Fondazione Prada, Venice (2007), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), and the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004). In 2004, he represented Germany at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale.

Living in Berlin since 1996 Thomas Demand is an artist known for his large-format photographs, which explore the blank domain between reality and the ways it is being represented. He is undoubtedly regarded as one of the most renowned artists of his generation. Using paper and cardboard he builds three-dimensional, usually life-size models of places which often make references to pictures found in the mass media. By taking photographs of the scenery created in this way, he produces artefacts of a kind of their own which play with the beholder's ideas of fiction and reality.

Other solo shows were hosted in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, in Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre as well as in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. His works are represented in many museums and collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Tate Modern, London.

Thomas Demand, Haltestelle, 2009, C-Print / Diasec, 240 x 330 cm, © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

Paul Pfeiffer, The Saints, 2007, 33 Min., Filmstill.

Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstraße 50/51
+49-0-30-3978-3412
Berlin
Beuys wing on the top floor
Paul Pfeiffer
The Saints
October 10, 2009-March 28, 2010

Paul Pfeiffer’s ground-breaking video and sculpture works explore the power of image culture and reflect how images are made. His works invite the audience to shift focus. The centerpiece of this exhibition is Pfeiffer’s sound and video installation The Saints, a restaging of the legendary 1966 World Cup final between West Germany and England in London’s Wembley Stadium. Executed in London, The Saints was commissioned in 2007 by Artangel. Inaugurated in the fall of that year, it was shown in an empty warehouse very near the legendary Wembley Stadium. In the meantime, thanks to the generous support of Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London, it was acquired for the collection of the Nationalgalerie. Its overwhelming sound of masses cheering and chanting accompanies the visitor while watching Pfeiffer’s Empire (2004, on loan from Julia Stoschek Foundation e.V.) that shows the real time of the creation of a wasps’ nest over the course of three months. The mental space evoked by the sound also materializes upon encountering Pfeiffer’s Vitruvian Figure (2009, on loan from Sammlung Goetz), a huge model of a sports stadium.

Paul Pfeiffer, The Saints, 2007, Loop: 33 min., 18-channel sound and videoinstallation, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
2009 erworben durch Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London
2009 acquired by Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London
The result of the 1966 football World Championship is not simply legendary; this history-charged spectacle is mythical even today. This highly symbolic and emotional situation forms the backdrop for The Saints.

Based on original film and sound materials, this video and sound installation illuminates and re-stages the most important sports event in European post-war history. Paul Pfeiffer hired approximately 1000 Filipinos who gathered in a movie theater in Manila, the Philippines, where they cheered and chanted in accompaniment to a re-staging of the 1966 match. The 1966 event is hereby reconstructed and updated as a manifestation of an anonymous crowd. In addition, it is relocated geographically and culturally from Wembley to Manila.

For Paul Pfeiffer, this event is part of our collective memory, and it points to the symbolic encounter of two former wartime enemies who now reconvene— surrounded by their plentiful fans—on an emblematic battle-ground. The followers are the stadium’s constitutive element; its so-called witches’ cauldron is one of the last resorts in our industrialized society that serves as a legitimate space for anger, joy, aggression, violence, as well as national identity. Thereby, this piece deals with such topics as identity, historiography, transferability of popular motives, and fanatic sports culture. The Saints takes on an existential level that goes beyond the specific context of the 1966 football World Cup.

Paul Pfeiffer, Empire, 2004
Single channel video, 3 month duration, Dimensions variable, Julia Stoschek Foundation e.V., Düsseldorf
A real-time digital video, Empire shows the creation of a wasps’ nest over the course of three months. Pfeiffer recorded the queen building her nest, laying her eggs and establishing her rule. The recording’s first and last moments are dictated by the natural life cycle of the particular nest. There is no editing: the webcam runs continuously. While watching Empire, one can already hear the sound of The Saints. It is the specific sound of soccer fans cheering and chanting. In both Empire and The Saints Pfeiffer explores the relation of individual bodies to the larger, social bodies. Personal identity is submerged into a larger entity. One can go even further and link Empire to the history of Wembley Stadium itself, inaugurated as Empire Stadium in 1923 on the occasion of the British Empire Exhibition. Empire and The Saints represent different versions of hierarchical formations in progress. Empire’s very length of three months implies the impossibility of viewing it in its entirety; we can only catch a fragment. Thus, even before entering the exhibition space of The Saints, our perception is already being tested.

Paul Pfeiffer, Vitruvian Figure, 2009, Birch multiplex, spy mirror, stainless steel polished, 586 x 472 x 240 cm, Sammlung Goetz
The sound of The Saints has already led our imagination to the arena of sports spectacle. Now Vitruvian Figure — a huge model of a sports stadium — literally blocks our way. Yet, it does not represent the entire architectural space but uses mirrored glass to evoke the idea of a whole. The perfection of the wasps’ nest in Empire seems to be echoed in the stadium architecture. While Empire shows a colony of wasps building a nest, we now see an architectural space built to bring together thousands of people. Modeled after a classical amphitheatre, the stadium is a well-designed and perfectly proportioned geometrical space. The title, Vitruvian Figure, refers to the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius who defined architecture as an imitation of nature. Vitruvius argued that humans construct their houses from natural materials that give them shelter the same way, for instance, wasps built their nests.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966, Paul Pfeiffer spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, he went on to attend Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City, where he currently lives and works. Venues for Pfeiffer’s solo exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, K21, Düsseldorf and Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, PS1, and the Guggenheim in New York, and his work has been included in The Whitney Biennial and La Biennale di Venezia. In 1994, Pfeiffer received a fellowship from the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation, and in 2000 he was the first recipient of The Whitney’s Bucksbaum Award. In 2001 he was an artist-in-residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was awarded The Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Art in 2009. Pfeiffer was recently the subject of a major career spanning solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (Spain) in 2008, and is currently preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at BAIBAKOV art projects in Moscow.

A catalogue will be published by the Kehrer Verlag (German / English) with a wide-ranging interview by Paul Pfeiffer and James Lingwood, essays by Kodwo Eshun, An Paenhuysen, Britta Schmitz, and Ian White. ISBN 978-3-88609-670-1.

Paul Pfeiffer, The Saints, 2007, 33 Min., Filmstill.

Dieter Roth / Björn Roth, Gartenskulptur, 1968ff, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 2008, Schenkung der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, © Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg, und Dieter
Roth Estate, Foto: Roman März, Berlin.

Joseph Beuys, Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1982-83, Sammlung Marx (Eigentum Land Berlin), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009, Foto: Thomas Bruns, Berlin.

Flanking, John McCracken, Galileo, 1989, Saturn, 2000, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © John McCracken, Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York, und Lisson Gallery, London, Center, Duane Hanson, Lady with Shopping Bags, 1972, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009, Foto: Thomas Bruns, Berlin.

Flanking, Cy Twombly, Thyrsis, 1977, Orion II, 1968, Sammlung Marx, © Cy Twombly, Center, Michelangelo Buonarotti, Sterbender Sklave, 1513-1516, Gefesselter Sklave, 1513-1516, Gipsabgüsse nach den Originalen im Louvre, Paris, © Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Foto: Thomas Bruns, Berlin.

Flanking, Paul McCarthy, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (Gold), 1997-1999, Michael Jackson Fucked Up (Big Head), 2002, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © Paul McCarthy, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich London. Foto: Roman März, Berlin, Center, Thomas Ruff, 20h 00m/-50°, 1989, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © Thomas Ruff & ESO / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2009. Foto: Thomas Bruns, Berlin.

Gerd Rohling, Die Kollektion, 1989-2009, © Gerd Rohling, Foto: Gerd Rohling.

Isa Genzken, Science Fiction / Hier und jetzt zufrieden sein (mit Wolfgang Tillmans), 2001, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 2008 Schenkung der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, © Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln Berlin, Foto: Roman März, Berlin.

Roman Ondák, It Will All Turn Out Right in the End, 2005-2006, Installationsansicht Tate Modern, London, 2006, © Roman Ondák, , Courtesy the artist and gb agency, Paris, Martin Janda, Wien, Johnen Galerie, Berlin.

Foreground, Marcel Duchamp, Roue de bicyclette, 1913/1964, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © Succession Marcel Duchamp / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2009, Back, Robert Kus´mirowski, Wagon, 2006, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 2009 erworben durch die Stiftung des Vereins der Freunde der Nationalgalerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, © Robert Kus´mirowski, Johnen Galerie, Berlin Foto: Thomas Bruns, Berlin.

Paul McCarthy, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (Gold), 1997-1999, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, © Paul McCarthy, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich London, Foto: Roman März, Berlin.

Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstraße 50/51
+49-0-30-3978-3412
Berlin
Die Kunst ist super!
September 5, 2009-
February 14, 2010

True to the title "DIE KUNST IST SUPER!" (Art is super!), this exhibition is one of the most significant measures for the repositioning of the Hamburger Bahnhof under the new director of the Nationalgalerie, Udo Kittelmann. Employing a broad range of thematic, monographic and motivic constellations, surprising dialogues and associative interpolations, the exhibition endeavors to cast works from the Nationalgalerie, the Marx Collection and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof as well as the Marzona Collection in a new light. At selected points throughout the display, the museum’s collections are complemented by works loaned by artists, some of them having been created especially for the rooms at the museum, as well as loans sourced from the rich collections comprising Berlin’s museum landscape. In all parts of the museum, the vast new presentation of the collections builds upon a vibrant interplay of references and associations, correspondences and contrasts which extends throughout the various parts of the museum.

Fluxus and Happening, presented on the ground floor of the main building, emerged during the 1960s and soon evolved into international movements which sought to expand and dissolve the boundaries of art. Artists including Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell and Allan Kaprow began to explore new materials such as everyday objects or food products as well as media such as television or video. The presentation of art was no longer confined to conventional institutions, with actions now being performed in public space or in university auditoriums as well. Inspired by the words of Heraclitus “All is in flux, nothing stays still,” Fluxus opposed traditional approaches to art and the treatment of material with which they went hand in hand. New emphasis was placed on fleeting events, the humorous investigation of patterns of thought and perception, and the latent poetry of everyday experiences and objects. The concept of “Fluxus” gradually established itself as a designation for the many different activities of an international network of artists who joined forces to explore the interstices of music, visual art, literature, dance and theatre at concerts, events and exhibitions. The Fluxus movement centered around the cities of New York, Tokyo, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Wiesbaden, although there were also ties to the Viennese Actionists and to Joseph Beuys. Fluxus manager George Maciunas published action scores, games and editions which were intended to be used playfully. These were sold for nominal sums in order to allow ordinary people to buy and use them. The Happening artists, on the other hand, aspired to provoke new ideas and change audience behavior with their complex theatrical actions. In keeping with the motto “Art is life; life is art,” the spectator became a participant in artistic activity.

On the occasion of the exhibition Die Kunst ist super! the major ensemble of works by Joseph Beuys is being newly presented in the rooms of the west wing. Occupying a unique position in the world, this collection of installations, objects and film documents impressively demonstrates Beuys’s efforts to expand the concept of what constitutes art. His provocative sculptures made from unusual materials such as fat and felt and the film recordings of his performances and political actions offer an insight into the totality of Beuys’s artistic practice. For example, the sculpture Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (The End of the Twentieth Century 1982-83), which is exhibited here for the first time in its original version, clearly shows the “directional forces” within his utopian thinking which figured each human being as an artist. Beuys was convinced that, if we are ever to achieve freedom, humanity must intervene and shape evolution by means of artistic action. He saw art as providing the only chance to positively counteract the destructive aspects of human coexistence.

In parallel with the important series of works by Joseph Beuys, the Kleihueshalle also brings together major works from the Marx Collection under the theme of “Vanitas”. Vanitas is a term used to denote pictorial themes and symbols (like skulls, clocks or mirrors) that recall the transitory nature of all earthly things and caution of the meaninglessness of all striving for riches, sensual pleasure or fame. Here, questions are raised about the vanity and the glamorous, yet simultaneously productive, aura of the idol — one of Andy Warhol’s central themes. His painting Cagney (1962), which shows the famous screen gangster in a shooting scene, both introduces this part of the exhibition and offers a modern take on Vanitas. The human being, caught in the hubris that lies between death and vanity, is one of the recurring themes in art. In the context of the current display, it can be witnessed in the self-exaltation through the criminal and political use of force, in the vain self-presentation of superstars, or in the abysmal depths of history and culture and their holy places. The metaphorical aspect of the presentation is underscored by the dialogues between works from the Marx Collection with plaster casts of famous works and death masks from the Gipsformerei der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (Replica Workshop of the State Museums of Berlin). This can be seen, for example, in the juxtaposition of a plaster replica of the popular Nefertiti with an image of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol. Elevated to mythical status and at the same time degraded to the level of mass-produced product, both of these “goddesses” embody the felicity and the tragedy of idolization in their own different ways. Two historical copies of Michelangelo’s unfinished slave for the sepulchre of Julius II stand at the center of the gallery featuring paintings by Cy Twombly: the one hopelessly struggling, the other dying.

The main hall is devoted to two large-scale installations revolving around the themes of models and reconstructions, illusions and artistic reproductions. Roman Ondák’s installation It Will All Turnout Right in the End (2005-2006) appears at first glance to be no more than a large box, deposited behind the columns of the side aisle. Yet the simplicity of its external appearance is counteracted as soon as one enters the installation and finds oneself inside a replica of the famous Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. For the installation Waggon (2006) Robert Kusmirowski reconstructed a historical goods wagon of the type used in the days of the Second World War as a 1:1 model using simple materials. In this work the artist quite consciously uses a sensory illusion to draw the viewer into an interplay between reality and illusion and between history and the present. The installation was recently purchased for the Nationalgalerie by the Stiftung des Vereins der Freunde. These works are accompanied by a work that has shaped the history of twentieth-century art: •Bicycle Wheel• (Roue de bicyclette, 1913) by Marcel Duchamp.

On the upper floor of the main building works by Alfred Keller, Gerd Rohling, Lyonel Feininger, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Jochen Alexander Freydank are assembled under the title Modellversuche 1 + 2 (Model experiments 1+2). Model experiments are a means of achieving a more profound and comprehensive understanding of reality. Famed as a “scientific sculptor” during his own lifetime, Alfred Keller created a range of fascinating models of various insects and micro-organisms in the course of his many years of service at Berlin’s natural history museum, the Museum für Naturkunde. Keller, who regarded himself as a sculptor, spent up to a year working on a single model. Even today his insect models remain state of the art and are unique in their degree of technical perfection. The form of presentation in illuminated showcases creates a formal link between Keller’s models and Gerd Rohling’s Kollektion (Collection, 1989-2009), a collection of colorful vessels from around the world. The exhibits are spotlighted, making them appear precious and, at first glance, to be objects from another time — archaeological artifacts or historic glasses which, like the insect models, seem to have been transferred to contemporary surroundings from another museum. Their true nature and the actual process of creation are only revealed at second glance. The works by Lyonel Feininger, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Jochen Alexander Freydank transport us into the realm of childhood imagination, a place governed by its own very unique manifestations of reality. In his Schattenspiel (Shadow Play, 2002-2009) Feldmann has developed a lively “world theatre” which captivates the viewer. Simple light sources transform a moving collection of toys and knick-knacks into a neverending cycle of shadows which emerge and disappear, increase and diminish, always remaining intangible. During the 1940s and 1950s he produced a group of 68 hand-carved, painted figures and houses. Entitled •Die Stadt am Ende der Welt (The City at the End of the World)•, the work was named after a drawing by the artist dating back to 1911. Viewed in connection with his earlier paintings Karneval (1908) and Dämmerdorf (1909) it offers a glimpse at the existential experience of loss and exclusion, while simultaneously invoking the artist’s romantic yearning for and sense of belonging to the German towns and villages which were the basis and motif for so many of his paintings. Freydank, whose Spielzeugland (Toyland 2007) was awarded the Oscar for best live-action short film in 2009, set the action of his film in Nazi Germany in 1942. The sons of two neighboring families, Heinrich and David are friends. When David and his parents are about to be deported, Heinrich’s mother invents a story and explains to her son that his friend will be going to a place called “Toyland”. She has no idea of the irresistible pull triggered by the supposed Toyland in the mind of the child.

The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection has been presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof since 2004. Comprising some 2,000 works by 140 artists, the collection centers on works of art produced during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The works from the collection are gradually being presented to the public in a comprehensive series of exhibitions. These exhibitions seek to present the collection from a variety of different perspectives in formats ranging from thematic survey shows through to monographic presentations. In the spring of 2008 Friedrich Christian Flick donated 166 works from his collection to the Nationalgalerie. Among these were outstanding works by Absalon, Richard Artschwager, Isa Genzken, Martin Kippenberger, Dieter Roth, Wolfgang Tillmans and Franz West which are currently on show in the Rieckhallen alongside works from the Marx and Marzona collections as well as the Nationalgalerie’s own holdings. It is a presentation that takes up and varies the theme of Vanitas raised in the main building. Indeed, the perpetually shifting form of Dieter Roth’s Gartenskulptur (Garden Sculpture, 1968-) is defined as much by processes of growth and expansion as it is by those of decay and decomposition, for the ongoing addition of new elements to the work over the decades of its evolution continues to keep the work alive today. What emerges overall is a dialogue in which the wildly proliferating structure of the Gartenskulptur meets the stringent formalism of Minimal Art, and the sense of anxiety engendered by the works of Absalon and Bruce Nauman is dispelled just as quickly as it takes hold of the viewer by the colorful lines sent dancing across the walls by Otto Zitko.

Alfred Keller, Menschenfloh (Pulex irritans), 100fach vergrößertes Modell, 1930, Kornkäfer an einem Weizenkorn (Sitophilus granarius), 85fach vergrößertes Modell, 1935, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, © Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Foto: Thomas Bruns.

Haunch of Venison
Heidestrasse 46
+49 (0)30 39 74 39 63
Berlin
Mat Collishaw
Submission
September 12-
December 19, 2009

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, British artist Mat Collishaw presents a corrupted digital manipulation of Francis Bacon's "Pope Innocent X," itself famously appropriated from a Velazquez original. Entitled "The End of Innocence" and projected on a monumental scale, Collishaw's rendering of the iconic portrait presents a densely striated image, its forms constantly dissolving and reconstituting in the manner of the 'digital rain' popularised by the Matrix film trilogy.

In stark contrast to the postmodern digital encoding of Bacon's Pope, the other works in the exhibition reveal Collishaw's fascination with Victorian-era viewing devices and techniques. The distorted figures of a toreador and a bull in the anamorphic bullfight video "Skin Flick 2" only become pictorially coherent when viewed in a mirrored javelin that lances the table. Similar representations of human violence against the animal kingdom are found in "The Garden of Unearthly Delights." Animated by a mechanised zoetrope, devilish imps attempt to spear snails, throw rocks at butterflies and hit fish in this spectral garden.

Accompanying these major new works is a series of "Insecticide" photographs featuring insects captured at the moment of their death. Enlarged on an epic scale, Collishaw calls these images "degraded and violent memorials to a once living form". The embalmed bodies of the insects evince the brutality of their death: their velvet-like wings torn, their antennae broken, their internal fluids bleeding from their crushed thoraxes. Their presentation recalls the practice of classifying and displaying naturalia in seventeeth-century cabinets of curiosity.

Collishaw's work reveals an ongoing preoccupation with representational techniques, how we consume imagery, and with visual devices that beguile the human eye. The artist is typically interested in images which are at once alluring and disturbing, which elicit ambivalent feelings of enchantment and disenchantment, attraction and repulsion in the viewer. "I'm interested in the way imagery affects me subliminally," Collishaw comments. "Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to find stimulating. The dark side of my work primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind."

Mat Collishaw (born in Nottingham, 1966) is renowned for photographs and video installations that meld a style and technique reminiscent of much older art forms with images and projections of fascinating and shocking beauty. This juxtaposition of contemporary images and historical references produces a highly charged visual experience that tests the viewer's resolve and sensibility, creating mixed feelings of enchantment and disenchantment. We are at once horrified and seduced by images that merge the cruel and the caring, the morbid and the poetic, the repulsive and the alluring. In the artist's own words: "I'm interested in the way imagery hits me subliminally... Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to find stimulating."

This duality can be found in the "Infectious Flowers" series. Flowers, usually associated with beauty and fertility, become a vehicle for representing illness, suffering, death and disease. Their ordinary meanings and associations have been displaced. The seductive qualities of what Collishaw depicts in his art are in fact obscuring a disfigurement that lies hidden within the image. Thus, a quick glance at "Amaryllis" and "Orchids" yields a sense of beauty. It is only upon closer inspection that the viewer can identify their delicate petals made up of images of pustular disease — disquieting to contemplate, yet irresistibly alluring.

In more recent years Collishaw's work has expanded to include installation, drawing and painting, questioning not only our fascination with violence, sex and depravity, but through the medium of digitally altered images, the relationship between representation and reality.

Mat Collishaw currently lives and works in London where his work has been received to increasing critical and public acclaim ever since he exhibited at "Freeze" in 1988 and "Modern Medicine" in 1990. Since then he was given a solo exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in 1996 where he exhibited an animation of a night-club stripper morphed together from photographic stills and took part in the infamous 'Sensation' exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997 where he displayed large-scaled tiled photographs of a bullet wound in a head, mounted on 15 light boxes. Collishaw has also been a significant figure on the international scene for over a decade, exhibiting at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1996 where he presented photographic works that combined antique and contemporary forms of moving image devices, the "L'Hiver de l'amour" and "Life/Live" shows at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville and the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1998.