CANDYLAB
THOMAS FEUERSTEIN
 
26 April 2013 – 15 June 2013
Opening: 25 April, 18 pm
Venue: 401contemporary, Potsdamer Straße 81 B, Berlin (Tiergarten)
 
The examination of language as written text or spoken word forms the basis of Thomas Feuerstein’s works, which consist of translations, transformations and processes. His works incorporate both information and biotechnology to form communicating vessels and narrative networks and are realised in a variety of media, including drawings, sculptures and paintings. The processual sculptures featured in the exhibition CANDYLAB embody both symbolic and molecular transformations in an artistic manner.
 
For CANDYLAB, Thomas Feuerstein creates a setting that is part Viennese apartment and part laboratory. A mix of art nouveau furniture and bioreactors evokes associations with eating, reading, digestion and writing. At the heart of the exhibition is the processual sculpture PANCREAS, which gives bodily form to the books through biotechnical means.
 
PANCREAS (gr. pán = “all”, kréas = “flesh”) transforms language and literature, books and paper into sugar through the process of fermentation. The glucose (a simple sugar) produced from the cellulose of the books actually functions as a fuel in the CANDYLAB exhibition, which facilitates the growth of in vitro cultivated brain cells in a hand-blown glass brain. While the brain cells in the work PANCREAS are exclusively fed by Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit”, other types of books, like fiction, philosophy or cookbooks, produce the material for sugar glass, which then gives rise to sculptures and illustrations. When mixed with potassium nitrate, sugar extracted from science fiction books, for example, is transformed into rocket propellant for the sculpture IDEE (idea).
In its dual role as a work of art and technical function – a combination specific to Feuerstein – the glass sculpture SARKOPHAG (sarcophagus) produces alcohol from glucose.
 
As a source of energy and meaning, sugar draws from a variety of frames of reference, from biology and economics to capitalism and notions of paradise, to mythology and science. Sugar acts as a storage shed of narrative energy, which then entangles Feuerstein’s artistic methods of “conceptual narration” for us into real and artistic fictional stories. His “transformation machines”, which interweave scientific, social and economic realities into artistic narratives using conceptual aesthetic processes, set alchemistic cycles of production – both of meaning and potential – into motion.
 
Thomas Feuerstein (*1968, Innsbruck, Austria) studied art history and philosophy from 1987 to 1995 at the University of Innsbruck. Since 1997 he has had teaching assignments at various of Universities in Austria and Switzerland. Feuerstein’s work is created in a variety of media and includes installations, environments, objects, drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, video, audio dramas and internet art. Essential ingredients are the connection between linguistic and visual elements, the tracing of latent links between fact and fiction and the interlacing of art and science.

A Group of Six Artists
26.04.2013 — 15.06.2013
Like panel paintings that have lost their shape, in rows one behind another, hang two groups of vaulted and twisted rubber formations on a type of rack. Made up of warped geometric, black and white surfaces, the individual forms (or anti-forms) radiate a latently perverse sensuality. The sober, almost pedantic simplicity of “classical” Formalism is cracked open by the suggestive use of the rubber surfaces. As if in storage or a fashion house, the works hang on a rail and compacted together build a meta-work: “Hängung“ by Geerten Verheus.
 
The works of Vlado Martek are also located between anti-homage and homage. The exhibition owes it‘s title to the artist’s “Grupa šestorice” (Group of Six), which was founded in the middle of the 70s. (Alongside Martek, Mladen and Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović, Boris Demur, and Željko Jerman were also members of the Zagreb collective.) On roughly drawn maps of their respective countries are the names of famous musicians, poets and other quasi-state-approved creatives. Where Paris would be expected to be, Mallarmé found his place. Poland is dominated by Chopin. Art and context concur. As so often with Martek, banality and meaning can hardly be told apart from each other; a muddle of high culture and nonsense that sometimes can be seen to be political.
 
“Attributes of modification, relocated public sculpture (Hill Arches)” is an installation by Max Schaffer, which consists of printed large format tarpaulins that show a work by Henry Moore. Every winter, the “Hill Arches” on Karlsplatz in Vienna are encased in scaffolding for several months, and are replaced by pictures that show four views of the monumental bronze. In “A Group of Six Artists”, the views are interlaced and the surfaces translated into a spatial configuration in which back and front, inside and outside can hardly be distinguished from each other; and so the public sculpture is brought into relation with the gallery space.
 
The concentrated circle and circular segment forms in Michael Dreyer‘s pictures clearly testify to the crafted process of their formation. “Mistakes” are deemed acceptable and at times deliberately produced. The perfect form of the circle takes on a handwritten characteristic. Through the bringing together of different open as well as closed circles, which are drawn with the help of a thread or beam compass, pulsating constellations of compelling vitality are formed between mandala and tracery, form and shape, painting, mechanics and handwriting.
 
With Channa Horwitz and Luis Camnitzer, two important figures of early Conceptual Art are represented in “A Group of Six Artists”. Since the beginning of the 1960s, graphic sheet music and notations of movement and sounds (“Sonakinatographies”) are at the centre of Horwitz’s work. On a foundation of logical order, time is fixed in the medium of drawing and is translated into graphic rhythms and serial structures. Until today, equally strict and exact, and in the limits of the self-implemented order, playful compositions are formed.
 
The Installation ”S.S. Atlantus" by Luis Camnitzer is made up of three elements; a large scale print of a postcard with the image of a wrecked ship, a concrete block which sits on the bottom of a bowl of water and a brass plate on which in simple words the following is written: “S.S. Atlantus. Remains of experimental concrete ship, one of twelve during World War I. Proved impractical after several transatlantic trips because of weight. Towed and sunk here as wharf in 1926.” As if fallen from time, the “Atlantus” tells of dreams of the past, the wrong ways of modern technology, and the hubris from before the devastating war. Close to the shore, not so far away, floats a simple small rowing boat, which appears to melancholically wink at the tired monstrosity.
 
For further information please contact Aanant & Zoo.

The main work of Hans-Peter Feldmann consists of books. In our five Hans-Peter Feldmann solo
exhibitions since 1995 the focus has been repeatedly put on his bookwork – for example, in 1998 we showed in our gallery the book “Die Toten 1967 – 1993”. In the current exhibition we enfold the major part of his books extensively.

Maria Lassnig
April 26 - June 18, 2013
Opening Friday, April 26, 6 - 9pm
 
Capitain Petzel is delighted to announce the first solo-exhibition by Maria Lassnig at the gallery in Berlin.
 
Maria Lassnig counts as one of the most important artists of the present and has set new standards for
generations of artists in both her subject-matter and her radical presentation of it, in drawing and painting as
well as film and video. The artist achieved international recognition through her participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale, the documenta 1982 and the documenta 1997. Large-scale solo exhibitions of her work were mounted most recently at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, the MUMOK Vienna in 2009, the Lenbachhaus, Munich in 2010 and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2011. Maria Lassnig was born in Kappel in Krappfeld (Austria) in 1919 and today lives and works in Vienna and Carinthia.
 
Since the 1940s Maria Lassnig has dealt, through painting and drawing, almost exclusively with the visualization
of internal sensations of the body, a theme she terms “Body Awareness-Drawings and -Paintings”. Through this
approach she has created a lifetime’s body of work which takes as its starting point a recognition of the human body’s potential as a medium for generating images.
 
In 1980, after residing for many years in Paris and New York, the artist returned to Vienna, where she was
appointed to a post at the Academy of Art, becoming the first female Professor of painting in a german-speaking country.
 
Capitain Petzel shows ten paintings, most of which were created in the last three years. All canvases come directly from Maria Lassnig’s atelier and are presented in public for the first time.
 
In these new large-format works Maria Lassnig investigates themes including gender-roles, with figurative elements presented against monochromatic backgrounds in a colour-palette characteristic of the artist‘s work. The spectrum of motifs ranges from a double-portrait (“Adam und Eva“, 2010) and the presentation of a couple in the act of love, an amorphous green creature seeming to float above them (“Die Inspiration“, 2010), to a half-portrait of a young man who literally reveals his innermost, insofar as he opens up his chest with his own hands (“Der Jüngling“, 2011).
 
The exhibition “Maria Lassnig – Der Ort der Bilder“, jointly-produced by the Neue Galerie Graz and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, can be seen in Graz until the 28th of April, 2013, after which it will continue in Hamburg, from the 19th of June, 2013 onwards.
 
Press Contact I Capitain Petzel
Kathleen Knitter I Phone: +49 30 240 88130 I Email: knitter@capitainpetzel.de
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 6 pm

DUVE Berlin is pleased to present Die Grünen Löwen an exhibition of new work by Jen DeNike.
 
For her second solo exhibition at the gallery DeNike embarks on a journey that is born out of a mythical tale of historic orighttp://www.duveberlin.com/exhibitions/1446/press-releasein, spinning a narrative that the audience will experience in a durational live performance.
 
In the heyday of discovery, a team of German archaeologists found, in an ancient temple, 107 young women wrapped in white linen. They lay in two long rows, their bodies tightly entwined. A girl with a gold ribbon in her hair lays at the head of one row, a girl with a silver ribbon at the head of the other. To this day, the significance of the ribbons remains a mystery. Why were only two ribbons found? What ritual, long forgotten, had taken place here? Were they favored by gods or by men? Was gold dearer than silver. Or, forever obscured by the secret hierarchy of lost religions, were the maidens adorned merely because they lay at the head of their long lines of lovers?
 
Medieval alchemists were interested in transmutation of non-organic base materials, substances, into more exalted materials such as gold. The inner practice of alchemy, involves the transformation of the individual from the unconscious raw being into a form of enlightened consciousness.
 
Gold is a perfect body, engendered of argent-vive, pure, fixed, clear, red and of sulphur - clean, fixed, red, and not burning. Gold is satisfied, and wants nothing.
 
Silver is a body - clean, pure, and almost perfect - begotten of argent-vive - pure, almost fixed, clear, and white. It is of such like as sulphur - it wants nothing, save a little fixation, color, and weight.
 
A green liquid sulfate called “vitriol” purifies the matter, leaving behind gold.
 
Gold is the sun - silver is the moon. One plus seven equals eight. Eight is the lion. The lion is the sun. The green lion eats the sun, the green lion purifies, and the green lion consumes all.
 
The Die Grünen Löwen performance consists of an impressive cast of maiden girls and will be accompanied by a selection of collaged linen on wooden boards, and a series of gold and silver photographic works, including a special limited edition vinyl 45’ Single LP entitled “Gold/Silver” in collaboration with composer Orson Sieverding and the mezzo soprano opera singer Anna Katherina Hilpert. The recording of Richard Strauss’ “Die Nacht”, where the night famously steals the beloved from the lover, and Sieverding’s original bassline driven beat track will premiere at the opening reception and will be played throughout the exhibition.
 
Faced with our often ambiguously perceived human state of the duality of the male and female, DeNike thrives for a meditative state that bridges the gap to conceive the unity - as one. Like Isis and Osiris, children of Geb and Nut: the process of continuity, the circle, is key in most of her work. Two poles in movement yearning to overcome what has been lost. The longing for serenity - the search for being whole, aimed at through an allegoric rite de passage of procedural change of the basic substance matters from chaos to order. This meditative process can be partly understood when we split the works into their basic powers, their cautiously interwoven narrative elements and look at what they reveal to us. Water, silver, gold, the moon, the sun, the color white, the circle - all are representatives of a deeper symbolic meaning that meanders in a reverberating current throughout DeNike's oeuvre. Are the maidens in the performance asleep akin to Shakespeare’s Juliet? Are they hovering above ground on their way out of this profane world into a higher state of sacred life? Are they laid down to rest? What are they waiting for? Or are we awaiting them to come to protect us with their wisdom? Is it us we see parting and shifting, embarking into the next world, like Rê would have crossed the nightly sky on his Mondbarke? The synthesis that DeNike explores with help of these Stellvertreter allows us a glimpse into another world. We may not be able to put our finger on it, but if we are to allow ourselves to perceive with all our senses, DeNike’s work opens up to a world that contains magical knowledge of the prima materia, greater than the earthly worlds. A different kind of knowledge that feeds from secrets handed down over generations in the family of seers.
 
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Jen DeNike (1971) lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Bard College. Her work has been internationally exhibited including; Museum of Modern Art; MOMA/PS1; Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf; Deichtorhallen Hamburg, KW - Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; AutoCenter Berlin, The Brooklyn Museum; CCS Bard; Miami Art Basel: Art Public; Tensta Konsthall, Sweden; Performa Biennial; CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; MACRO Roma, Experimenta Biennial Australia; MOMA Shanghai, Mendes Wood Sao Paulo, Anat Ebgi Los Angeles. She recently presented Lolita, Lo a site commissioned video and performance with LAND in Los Angeles curated by Shamim Momim. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Il Giardino dei Lauri Collection.