I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
FIENE SCHARP
 
22 June 2013 - 26 July 2013
Opening: 21 June 2013, 6 pm
Venue: 401contemporary, Potsdamer Straße 81 B, Berlin (Tiergarten)
 
401contemporary is delighted to announce the first collaboration with young Berlin artist Fiene Scharp (1984) and present her solo exhibition I I I I I I I I I I I I I I in the gallery space on Potsdamer Strasse.
 
Fiene Scharp’s work is characterised by great clarity. The artist’s repetitive structures allow the elemental media of her works – paper, graphite, ink – to unfold their full organic materiality.
Scharp traces fine graphite lines so closely together on wood with the graphite creating a relief-like surface that it makes the work oscillate between drawing and object. For it is only through the close sequence that the surprisingly lively materiality of graphite becomes visible. Its subdivision into rectangles results in a shimmering grid of delicate horizontal and vertical linear fields of various densities, which looks like it has been engraved.
 
Scharp tackles graph paper with a fine scalpel, cutting out small, precise boxes. This makes the paper resemble woven fabric, the play of light and shadow revealing the full extent of its fragility.
Yet her pieces do not merely resemble woven material – Fiene Scharp actually weaves individual hairs together into a gossamer fabric, or attaches hairs at the nodes of a delicate grid, so that, like tactile sensors, they extend the drawing out into space.
 
The organic idiosyncrasy of the material as well as the intricate, time-consuming creation process are both at variance with the prescribed strictness and systematisation of a grid; moreover, they bypass the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality, between strictness of form and organicity, and between craftsmanship and serial production. It is this that gives Scharp’s Œuvre its special quality: using drawing techniques, she achieves the finest reliefs and sculptural plasticity.
Her art has a great deal in common with historical precursors of both Concrete Art and Minimalism. The theme of the grid in particular links Fiene Scharp to many classic positions – Agnes Martin’s clear drawings, for example, come to mind. Yet, at the same time, the artist also manages to call forth another side to this tradition. The obvious materiality of her drawings makes them a commentary and continuation in their own right.
 
Fiene Scharp (1984, Berlin) is fascinated by the constant repetition of the simplest geometric elements. By using and processing material such as paper, graphite, hair and ink her works develop an organic presence and vacillate between drawing and object. Scharp holds an MA in Fine Arts from the UdK Berlin were she did her “Meisterschüler” with Gregor Schneider in 2011. In 2012 she was honoured with the “Meisterschüler” award by the president of the UdK Berlin. She has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and participated in the highly acclaimed exhibition “Rasterfahndung – Das Raster in der Kunst nach 1945” at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Germany) in 2012. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I is Scharp’s first solo exhibition with 401contemporary, Berlin.

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.