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.