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.

BROKEN ROMANCE is the first solo exhibition by the artist Martin Mannig in the Berlin gallery Gebr. Lehmann.
The canvases of the Dresden based artist are heady image spaces that are opening up to visual chaos. In a colour intensive mash up, elements of German and Japanese folk art are being mixed with those of American comic and Japanese manga and are put in their own visual context. Figures taken from TV series, dolls and toys become models of Martin Manning’s figure cabinet.
Prior the figures are being developed as drafts. In a variety of variations the artist gets from figure studies to results, which then move on to the stock of his figure cosmos and thus receive their right to exist in his paintings.
Within a time consuming work process the artist combines several of those figures on canvas. The bodies and heads of his characters are matched up in a bizarre fashion and seem like painted collages. The figures are alienated and break out of their former contexts and thus mutate to some extent. In various layers the figures have to assert themselves within the composition – they are over painted, replaced and over layered by other figures and image elements. Thus a visual density develops within which the mutated monsters and comic characters drop into a narrative context via the various layers of the image and tell stories. Thereby the virtual romance or the innocence of the figures is overstressed and breaks.
The reason for the occupation with Japanese popular culture as a central topic in the artist’s new works are stays and journeys to Japan – especially in the year 2011, shortly after the Tsunami and after the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. There the artist was directly confronted with the destructive effects of the natural catastrophe and the radioactive danger from Fukushima but also with the social and political belittlement of those problems.
For further information or images please contact us at berlin@galerie-gebr-lehmann.de Opening hours: tue - sat, 11 am - 6 pm

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.

 
Hamish Morrison Galerie is delighted to present its second solo exhibition of works by Dutch artist Han Schuil.
 
Han Schuil creates paintings on aluminium boxes that penetrate the exhibition space in their three-dimensionality. He once called aluminium the best foundation for painting because it greatly increases the intensity of the colours. Schuil works with great care and precision, both in terms of the technical aspects of his production, and the development of his visual vocabulary.
 
The artist finds his motifs in the everyday world: a building, a cartoon eye, the shape of a star, a mask – things that he sees and isolates in an intuitive, unplanned process, translating them into a new reality. This translation can sometimes lead to such a concentration that it results in a monochrome plane of colour.
 
The latest series of works, entitled Heat, opens up a new world in Schuil’s oeuvre. Whereas in earlier works, he tended to use signs and symbols, pictures of images firmly established in the general consciousness, in this series he uses motifs that stem from a more technical and scientific context. Heat XII makes us think immediately of a heat picture of thermal image: aren’t we seeing an upside-down thermography of a human body? The less figurative works such as Heat VIII, Heat IX, or Heat X also bring to mind warmth, light, or vibration. Even without knowing the titles, the almost perceptible pulsing of the colours communicates an energetic process. It is seldom that Schuil gives his paintings titles, so the fact that these works do have titles underlies the new direction he is taking. This fresh development in respect to motifs is consistent with an expansion of his painterly means, in terms of technique, as Schuil is now also using spray paint.
 
The evoked warmth of the pictorial representation stands in dynamic contrast to its material base. The elusive qualities of light and vibration unfold on the glossy-smooth surface of aluminium and the rigorous, controlled form of the rectangle or square. The ambivalence of a seemingly technical product and artistic artefact also applies to the motifs. Frequently the underlying aluminium is revealed, either because the sides are left unpainted or because in the lower part there are bars without any paint, reminiscent of eliminated or perhaps obscured text passages. As they appear so regularly, these lower bars, together with the rectangles in the paintings’ upper-half, make us think of a kind of production mark. Or is it a kind of tag, a mark, a signature?
 
On many levels there are exciting fields of tension in Han Schuil’s paintings. The images and signs from our collective image memory, and the markings that seem to be a signature, but remain difficult to decode, are just one example of an interesting pair of opposites – and inspire us to approach these works with an open and curious mind.

ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW / ANNETTE MESSAGER: Nördlich der Zukunft / North of the Future is the second exhibition at the Galerie Isabella Czarnowska in Berlin to relate two artistic oeuvres to one another. Like the earlier show (PAUL THEK / LUC TUYMANS: Why?!), North of the Future also pursues the aim of seeking out hidden or secret – and often surprising – links between the artists chosen and shedding light on them. In the first as well as the present exhibition, the work of an older artist is juxtaposed with that of a younger colleague, while at the same time a completed oeuvre is placed side by side with one in progress; in both cases, the artists contrasted are of the same gender. On the other hand, in neither case does the one oeuvre draw on the other or invoke something foreign to itself. Each is entirely and profoundly individual. Both artists, however, make reference to a superordinate intellectual or philosophical factor which indicates a common ethos.
 
North of the Future juxtaposes two women who address the problem of the self in different ways. Szapocznikow investigated the self by analyzing female sexuality, which she did in an a classical sculptural process (Samogłoska / Vowel), but also through the fragmentation of her own body – which the public encounters in multiplied, fragmented, sometimes lacerated polyester casts, sometimes combined with elements of the hard, “exterior” world of technology (Sprzątaczka / Cleaning Lady), and sometimes engulfed in “alien black matter” (La Ronde / The Round) –, through the confrontation of a woman‘s body with the quintessence of masculinity, the phallus, which could compete with César’s Thumb, whose functional original version it essentially represents (Fiancée folle blanche / Crazy White Fiancée), or through the body, which is ultimately crushed, pressed like a flower kept between the pages of a book as a memento (L´Herbier / The Herbarium). Scarred by the trauma of the Holocaust and fatal illness, Szapocznikow turned to biology with extraordinary generosity and an unusual sense of humour, and conceived of the body as a vessel of life of which only a dead shell can remain.
 
As Julia Kristeva expressed it, Annette Messager “travels her self” (“je me voyage”) by providing insight into the elements which furnish her imagination – determined, as it is, by culture and gender. She seems to rise “above the body” by having us communicate with objects and fabrics bearing the marks of a trivial female signifier. She ushers us into the world of the flea market overflowing with rummage, where you can buy old cuddly toys, new artificial hair wigs and thousands of other things that already have their “first lives” behind them. Kristeva calls Messager “a collector who has fun making people laugh while at the same time scaring them”. One might add that the artist treats above all herself to these two experiences when she undertakes operations on used objects (Sacs plastiques echévelés) or toys (6 Dissections as well as the recent Trois fusils). What we have here, however, is not the “diary” of a journey taken by the artist into her self. Instead, we wander with her through bloody visions of chaos, desire and unexploited “chances”, encounter impermanent cathedrals of femininity immersed in mourning (Mes voeux sous filet) and end up in the vicinity of a non-existent hotel (Hotel/Fiction).
 
When we contemplate the works of the two artists, we gain the impression that Messager is responding to a vanitas depiction developed by Szapocznikow, the motif of the medieval Dance of Death, which is characterized by black humour and the grotesque. In the case of Szapocznikow the roundelay is articulated by body parts, former sources of earthly pleasure meanwhile separated from one another; in the case of Messager, by objects robbed of their function and out searching “in the beyond” for amends for the degradation they suffered “in their first life”. Yet whereas Szapocznikow offers us knowledge of her self by way of the pars pro toto of a purely biological femininity condemned to destruction and decay, Messager invites us into Dante‘s purgatory to experience the phantoms of existence we have called to life, and the visions of hell we carry within ourselves. Kristeva compares the process of the artist’s self-journey with the migration through the belly of the Biblical whale. If we look to the story of Jonah, the belly can be seen as a prefiguration of purgatory. Here it should be added, however, that Annette Messager's whale is female.
 
The attention both artists pay to gender identity and its physiological, social and cultural implications does not repress the universal message, namely the revelation of that which is awkward, covered up and kept secret and which ordinary perception factors out with the aid of the hypocritical idea of the “well-regulated world order”. This general message also permeates the work of Paul Thek and Luc Tuymans.
 
What we essentially have here is a single, temporally unfolding exhibition of four artists. When we analyze its second manifestation, we are advised to recall the first, because this memory will enrich our impressions and deepen our reflections.
 
Anda Rottenberg

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.