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.
 
*
 
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.

The urge for self-improvement, the ideal of the flexible ego and the omnipresence of the media: Stefan Panhans’ works deal with contemporary society’s key themes.
The FELDBUSCHWIESNER gallery is pleased to present Stefan Panhans’ new photographs and two video works in their first solo exhibition with the artist.
 
In his most recent photographic series Items for Possible Video Sets (2009-2013), the world of commodities is condensed into a series of detailed, carefully constructed still lifes, which instrumentalize the aesthetic of commercial advertising photography and radically break free of its limitations. Even stranger than Lautrémont’s description of the “coincidental encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”, here burnt baguettes can be found next to bicycle locks and organic muesli on top of porn magazines: As if they had floated together from the driftwood of the consumer world into ambivalent spaces. The materiality and colouring of the objects create a virtuous interplay. The title of the photographs suggests a reference to the working sketches for new video works, however by generating confusion, it also questions the term of representation and the familiar meanings attributed to it.
 
In his video works, Stefan Panhans creates extremely stylized characters in alienating settings, which are governed by phenomena such as casting shows, Mediamarkt, Ayurveda wellness and fusion food. Works such as Sieben bis Zehn Millionen (2005), Who´s Afraid of 40 Zimmermädchen (2007) and If A Store Clerk Gave Me too Much Change (2009), have been filmed using one single shot. The entire activity stems from the protagonist’s monologue. This does not produce cinema but a temporal image.
 
The video Sorry (2010) stands out from the minimalist sets of the earlier works: In the interior of a high-speed train, an exaggerated panorama of the contemporary media world and its protagonists unfolds. Amy Winehouse, Karl Lagerfeld and Lady Gaga find themselves in an open-plan carriage together with Michael Jackson and the sleeping artist-messiah Jonathan Meese. The completely exhausted look-a-likes of modern VIPs sit listlessly on the seats or carry XXL coffee-to-go cups through the claustrophobically narrow train compartment. They push past hipster couples, demonic athletes and heavily armed police officers. Outfits turn out to be costumes and the mechanism of self-staging is exposed, as is the set itself – a cleverly staged tableau vivant, in which reality and fiction merge.
Not smooth, beautiful, alert and present, as is required in countless casting shows, from Germany's Next Topmodel to Dschungel-Camp, but reworked, emotionless, mechanical and devoid of meaning: this is how the protagonists appear in the video loop. The soundtrack, which was commissioned especially for the video, adds to the peculiar appeal of the work. The ritual-like actions of the protagonists are in this way interwoven with our contemporary reality.
 
The presentation is punctuated by the “commercial break” of the three-minute video Homestory (Il Cielo in Una Stanza) (2012). A young woman is seated in front of a bed, a serious and concentrated expression on her face. Noise music is playing in the background. As if at a dress rehearsal for an extreme sports exhibition, she carries a huge, neon-coloured traveller’s rucksack on her back. Every inch of her body seems tense, and with almost hysterical deliberation, she reads the menu of a hip restaurant out loud. The highly-strung energy and physical tension of her recital triggers a sense of nervousness in the viewer, and finally aggressiveness. We do not relax, even when at the end of her monologue she virtuously performs two yoga exercises – the immense pressure is still tangible and the desired wellness effect does not kick in.
 
Stefan Panhans (*1967, Hattingen) lives in Berlin and Hamburg. He has already been awarded numerous scholarships and prizes, including a Kunstfonds scholarship and the Förderpreis Bildende Kunst der Arthur-Boskamp Stiftung. His works have been presented in a series of important solo exhibitions, including Untitled & Items for Possible Videosets – Concrete Run. Art is Concrete. And so is Truth?, Camera Austria / Steirischer Herbst, Kunsthaus Graz (2012), I´m cold … did I actually do the bank transfer or what kind is it? Or is it tea?, W139, Amsterdam (2012), Wann kommt eigentlich der Mond raus?, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2011) and Who´s Afraid of 40 Zimmermädchen, Kunsthaus Hamburg (2008). His works were recently presented in the group exhibition Former West in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013). An upcoming show is being planned for 2014 in Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

We are pleased to announce the opening of Méduse & Cie, a group exhibition curated by Dennis Scholl, on April 26 at 6 pm. The exhibition will include works by Melody LaVerne Bettencourt, Michael Conrads, Max Frisinger, Ole Hartmann, Fränze Hoppe, Volker Hüller, Nicolai Kraus, Flo Maak, Katrin Rother, Dennis Scholl, Joern Stahlschmidt, Malte Urbschat and Johannes Weiss.
 
For further information and / or images, please contact the gallery.

Junggeun OH has been living in Berlin since 2005 and working continuously on his topic of The Interspaces.
Another exciting chapter of his intense work is presented at galerie son from 18 May to 13 July, 2013.
What Oh shows is consequent: he now brings into shape even the canvasses, cuts out and puts in the interspaces, reduces and abstracts.
Beside several motives from Berlin, this time Böttcherstraße in Bremen and the Basel Art Fair Building also became objects of his aesthetic view.

Florian Fausch
“Sollbruchstelle”
1. Juni – 6. Juli 2013,
Vernissage am 31. Mai (18 – 21 Uhr)
 
Bei Florian Fausch verschmelzen Aspekte der individuellen Erfahrung im städtischen Kontext mit Referenzen auf mediale Ästhetik und digitale Welten. Nicht von Ungefähr lassen sich auf die Arbeiten von Florian Fausch Termini aus dem Film anwenden, besonders das Genre des Science Fiction, aber auch digitale Szenarien aus animierten Computerspielen, sind ihm bestens vertraut. So knüpft der Maler auch an dort geläufige Raum-Metaphern an, bei denen Brüche und Sprünge offen legen, dass die Bindung an die Zeit die isotrope Raumvorstellung zwangsläufig relativiert. So fasst der Betrachter in seinen Bildern nicht verlässlich Fuß, denn der schollenartig aufgesprengte Grund, zwischen dem unverhofft Abgründe klaffen, lässt symbolisch das Gehen zum Abenteuer werden.
Scheinbar Unvereinbares findet in der malerischen Balance seiner Bilder einen temporären Ausdruck für das fragmentarische und zitathafte Lebensgefühl einer jungen Künstlergeneration, das nicht mehr durch das Postulat einer widerspruchlosen Verortung einlösbar ist.

It is the result of a collaboration between the Olbricht Foundation and two graduate students on the ‘Curating the Contemporary’ Master’s degree programme at London Metropolitan University. The programme is run in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery, London, under the directorship of Nico de Oliveira. This is the second time that the Foundation has invited young curators to develop their own ideas and perspectives on the Olbricht Collection, and to curate a show for me Collectors Room as part of their final degree module.
 
From early childhood all the way into old age, a myriad of different forms of play have shaped the lives of human beings since time immemorial. Learning experiences among infants, social interactions, and trials of strength in social games, the performing artistes’ acts in the theatre, and the act of making and maintaining a collection (which can itself be seen as a ‘mature’ form of play) are just a handful of examples of games.
 
As an omnipresent subject, be it consciously or subconsciously, the game in all its variants also finds expression in the art and works contained in the Olbricht Collection. Twenty-two works in various media such as painting, video, photography, and craft objects have been singled out and brought into play with one another by the curators Anna-Antonia Stausberg and Philippa O’Driscoll.
A publication is being released to accompany ‘PLAY’ .
 
List of featured artists: Mark Alexander, John M. Armleder, Gisela Bullacher, Jonas Burgert, André Butzer, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Gama, Philippe Halsmann, Esther-Judith Hinz, Bethan Huws, Alex McQuilkin, Jack Pierson, and Jorinde Voigt.

Michael Janssen Singapore is pleased to announce Peter Zimmermann’s first
solo exhibition in the Asia-Pacific, Crystal & Fruits.
Peter Zimmermann deconstructs traditional pictorial concepts in his works and
reveals the defining cultural power of visual practices. It is an aesthetic of illusion
being enacted here by means of diverse simulation techniques, such as cover
versions, sampling and remixing.
Peter Zimmermann's painting defies all attempts at categorization and has been
using epoxy resin for his pictures for over two decades. With their intense colours,
the various layers of epoxy interact with each other in order to create the
nuances that take on a captivating luminescence and take on an organic form,
giving the artworks a sculptural presence and a spatial impact.
Peter Zimmermann, born 1956 in Freiburg, lives and works in Cologne. He
studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. From 2002 to 2007, he
was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
Zimmermann’s exhibitions have featured at important European and American
institutions such as Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Klagenfurt and Columbus
Museum of Art, Ohio, USA. His works were shown at the Second Moscow
Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moskau, Rupertinum Museum der Moderne,
Salzburg, Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Museum Moderner Kunst,
Wien, Museum Ritter, Stuttart, Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Kunsthaus
Hamburg, Fondation Bruxelles, Brussel, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle,
Henry Moore Foundation, Barnard Castle Darlington and Biennale Venezia.

Nature Morte Berlin is pleased to announce Anita Dube’s first solo show in Germany.
 
Chance Pieces brings together a variety of sculptures, wall-based works and text pieces by the Delhi-based artist. Primarily a sculptor, Anita Dube (born in Lucknow, India in 1958) works in a wide variety of media and materials. Throughout her career, Dube has resisted making her work too absolute; her avoidance of pronouncements allows her to see art as “a form of speculation that attempts to turn people’s attention towards something.” In the large-scale sculpture Little Weapons of Defense, Dube has constructed a freestanding jali screen (similar to those found in Mughal architecture) from discarded styrofoam packing materials. Nestled into the jali’s spaces are rudimentary weapons, rock-shaped objects with skins of black velvet which seem to bleed over the structure. Exploring issues of the body, gender, and beauty, velvet has long become a signature material of the artist.
 
Dube’s on-going investigations into personal and societal loss and regeneration pry apart the political obstacles that get in the way of the human element, sometimes in its bare rawness. Ah (a sigh) enlarges a degenerated newspaper image of striving Indians and spells out a Hindi character across its surface with velvet-covered tree roots. Such works are indicative of her use of a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomenological experience. Her aesthetic approach to textuality is combined with an engagement with the intimacy of touch and a Gnostic exploration of the abstractions of linguistic systems. She employs a variety of found objects and materials drawn from the realms of industrial waste (foam, plastic, wire), indigenous craft (thread, beads, fabrics), the physical human (dentures, bones, body parts), and sacred iconographies (enamel idol eyes, mantras, hymns, poetry, calligraphy).
 
Trained as an art critic at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, Anita Dube came to her artistic practice through her involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of young artists formed in the late 1980s whose critical, social and political consciousness contrasted with the more established discourse of post-modernist, narrative painting of the previous generation which dominated Indian contemporary art at that time. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai in 2013, Galleria Marabina, Bologna in 2012, Gallery Dominique Fiat, Paris in 2011, Bose Pacia, New York in 2008, Almine Reich, Paris in 2007, Gallery SKE, Bangalore in 2006, and Nature Morte, New Delhi in 2005. Her works are included in prestigious institutional collections such as the Devi Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and Tate Modern in London.

In line with this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin (April 26–28), Galerie Thomas Schulte presents its third solo exhibition with the American sculptor Alice Aycock. The exhibition will open simultaneously with two extensive shows of the artist’s drawings at the Parish Art Museum as well as the Grey Art Gallery in New York. The artist will be present at the vernissage on April 26.
 
As one of the youngest members of the artist group around Gordon Matta-Clark and the 112 Greene Street Gallery, Alice Aycock reached international acclaim early on, gaining attention in the 1980’s for her large-scale mechanical installations. Since the start of her career within the bustling New York art world, Alice Aycock must be counted as the forerunner of many female artists who have conquered the male-dominated sculpting scene. At the same time, Aycock belongs to a generation of artists that have appropriated and questioned the technological and positivist approach of western civilization. Like many artists in the modernist tradition before her, she explored non-western cultures while concurrently grappling with traditions in architecture, science, and the arts.
 
Aycock’s artistic beginnings are found primarily in Land Art, where she, through the use of natural and building materials, was able to create architectural and semi-architectural sculpture and installations. Later, she increasingly turned to mechanical sculptures and apparatuses, stating, “Much of my work in both the public and private spheres has been a meditation on the philosophical ramifications of technology from the simplest tool (the arrowhead and the plow) to the computer. Many of these works have incorporated images of wheels and turbines and references to energy in the form of spirals, whirlwinds, whirlpools, spinning tops, whirly-gigs, and so on.“
 
In this regard, the large-scale aluminum sculpture Super Twister II, standing as the central focus of the exhibition, may be described in similar terms. As part of Aycock’s oeuvre, this work belongs to a series of recently developed sculptural assemblages, seeking to make visible the force of wind. Super Twister II stands in close relation to Aycock’s Park Avenue Paper Chase Project, which the artist will finalize in New York next year between 52nd and 57th street. The six dynamic and spacious sculptures developed for this project embody wind energy as well as the forces of colliding thoughts and ideas that continuously flow through the city and its streets. Resembling waves, currents, tornados, and turbines, the sculptures are a metaphor for the energy of the city. At the same time, Aycock makes reference to paper-models that are made by architects and were once used by the Russian constructivists to visualize artistic ideas.
 
Next to Super Twister II, the gallery will also show a selection of drawings, created in the context of the Park Avenue Paper Chase Project. Although the artist is primarily known for her large-scale outdoor installations, drawing has always served as an important platform for experimentation and the development of artistic thought processes. In drawing, Aycock not only visualizes her sculptural forms but also allows the drawing to become a performative work on its own. “Aycock is an artist who thinks on paper, and her spectacular drawings are equal parts engineering plan and science fiction imagining. (…) Concurrent with most drawings for actual public projects, Aycock has become increasingly preoccupied with virtual reality, and her current work addresses a blurring of the real, the imagined, and the almost-real, allowing us to, in her words, transport ourselves ‘farther into another place’.“
 
Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lives and works in New York City. Her work was presented in solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1980). Major group exhibitions include the 1979 and 1981 Whitney Biennials in NYC and Content: A Contemporary Focus, 1974–86 at the Hirshhorn Mu-seum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. In Germany Aycock was first presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and in 1983/84 in a comprehensive travelling exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and Skulpturenmuseum, Marl. After more than twenty years Galerie Thomas Schulte presented in 2010 the first exhibition of the artist in Germany in the gallery’s space in Berlin. Recently Aycock’s work was included in the first major museum survey on Land Art Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2012) as well as Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art at the Brooklyn Museum (2012/13). An extensive catalogue on her drawings has been published in conjunction with her retrospective at the Grey Art Gallery (New York University) and the Parish Art Museum. The exhibition will be traveling to the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2014.