For Gallery Weekend Berlin, Moeller Fine Art is pleased to announce two complementary exhibitions: “Lyonel Feininger: Drawn from Nature, Carved in Wood” and “T. Lux Feininger: Sixty Years of Painting” to run 27 April – 13 July, with an opening reception 26 April, 6 – 9pm. Gallery Weekend hours are 11am – 7pm, 27 – 28 April. Together, the exhibitions explore the work of father and son Lyonel and T. Lux Feininger in various media, tracing their development over nearly a century.
 
The rapid sketch from life, or “nature study,” as Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) called it, was the starting point for most of the artist’s work, which he later refined in his studio. Motifs, initially captured in nature studies, recur in Lyonel Feininger’s œuvre with extraordinary frequency, as T. Lux (1910-2011), his youngest son, wrote: “[they] consisted of the re-casting and re-drawing of a given composition, abandoning it and then taking it up again a day or a year or twenty-five years after, in any and all of the media.”
 
Lyonel Feininger freely translated such motifs; nature studies led to woodcuts and drawings, and woodcuts, in turn, even inspired paintings. Moeller Fine Art’s exhibition brings together more than 50 woodcuts from the artist’s personal collection, as well as related nature studies created between 1911 and 1920. Highlights include a rare painting, Chapel in the Woods, 1943, in which Feininger effectively recreates a woodblock print in oil on canvas. Lyonel Feininger also transposed such visual motifs into three dimensions, as in City at the Edge of the World, a group of 68 carved and painted figures and houses which were kept by the artist’s family, as well as in model trains he designed in 1913/14 and intended for mass production. These works feature many of the same elements found in his paintings and drawings, liberally reinterpreted in other media.
 
The work of T. Lux Feininger shows a fluidity similar to that of his father, yet expressed in his own inimitable visual language. T. Lux took up painting in 1929, while studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer. His paintings of the 1930s, such as Ship in the Gulf of Siam, 1931, often depict maritime subjects, not unlike those favored by his father. Later paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Mentone, 1976, however, are characterized by a stencil-like surface on which graphic planes of color are layered. The 16 paintings in Moeller Fine Art’s exhibition, ranging from 1931 to 1991, display the variety and unmistakable treatment of form which T. Lux Feininger employed in his work.
 
The exhibitions of Lyonel and T. Lux Feininger are a collaboration between Moeller Fine Art New York – Berlin and The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC.
 
For further information, please contact the gallery at +49 (0) 30 252 940 83 or via email at mail@moellerfineart.com. Moeller Fine Art Berlin is located at Tempelhofer Ufer 11 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Opening hours are from Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm, Saturday, 12am to 5pm, and during Gallery Weekend Berlin, on 27 – 28 April, 11am to 7pm. The closest U-Bahn stops are Hallesches Tor (U6) or Möckernbrücke (U7/U1). For further information on Gallery Weekend Berlin, please visit www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de.

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.

As part of this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin (April 26–28), Galerie Thomas Schulte will present a site-specific installation by Franka Hörnschemeyer in the gallery’s Corner Space. Hörnschemeyer’s installation will stand next to a larger solo exhibition with the American sculptor Alice Aycock. The artist will be present at the opening.
 
Franka Hörnschemeyer, who lives and works in Berlin, focuses her work on a multifaceted approach to redefining spatial conditions. As she explains, “To me a space represents a construction made up of social, historical, and psychological relationships that are constantly in an interplay with people. I examine these relationships and reorganize them.” As a rule, Hörnschemeyer’s special constructions are developed site-specifically, challenging the viewer to explore them through movement.
 
Unlike her previous constructions, Hörnschemeyer’s installation at Galerie Thomas Schulte is not set into movement by the viewer, but through a motor from within the construction itself. The construction’s mobile, horizontally swinging elements embody the principle of a marionette, questioning the relationship between gracefulness and movement. The elements divide the Corner Space into two levels, altering its outward perception. The horizontal elements create space by composing a type of suspended ceiling. At the same time, the construction is a moving figure, behaving within the room, much like a viewer would.
 
The installation’s title Im Innern der Figur references Heinrich von Kleist’s essay Über das Marionettentheater, in which the author describes a dialogue between the narrator and a dancer who admires the natural grace of the marionette. Here, Kleist writes, “Every movement, he said, has a focal point. It would suffice to control this from within the figure – the limbs, which would be mere pendulums, would follow, without needed assistance, in their own mechanical way.”
 
Due to conscious reflection, the dancer cannot match the natural gracefulness of the marionette. This means that the marionette’s absolute gracefulness would only be realizable if “it’s dance were to slip completely into a mechanical realm,” rather than being controlled by the human hand. This principle is of the central aspects being expressed in Hörnschemeyer’s installation. Furthermore, it finds a stage to perform on in the gallery’s Corner Space, whose big arched windows open onto Leipzigerstrasse.
 
Additionally, Hörnschemeyer’s digitally mastered Piezo prints, will be on display in the gallery’s Window Space. Some of these prints represent outlines of already existing works, including LaSound 908 – from the 2008 Berlin exhibition Megastructure Reloaded – as well as Konditional, the interactive moving foundation of the Polish city Zamosc. These prints, in form of layouts, allow us to understand the transparency of special systems, which run through the construction like labyrinths. On the other hand, the title of the series here exhibited Diffusion und Konfusion does not merely reference the finished project, but cryptological concepts. In this sense, it focuses on two basic principles of encryption that are fundamental to Hörnschemeyer’s work. Whereby Konfusion describes the blurring of the relationship between plain-language and secrete code and Diffusion suggests the principle of dissolving statistical structures.
 
Franka Hörnschemeyer was born in Osnabrück in 1958, and lives and works in Berlin. Her latest solo exhibitions include Franks International, Display, at the Wilhelm Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2011), The Presence of Noise at the Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2010), Peenemünde at the Jewish Museum, Athens (2008), Franks International at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007), and the TSE 11022 at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2002). Her most acclaimed works in public include Trichter, Dresden (2011), Koordinaten at Kunstwegen Station, Neugnadenfeld (2011), BFD – bündig fluchtend dicht, at the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin (2001), and PSE 900 at the Kunsthalle Hamburg (2000). She was part of many group exhibitions counting Wir sind alle Astronauten, Universum Buckminster Fuller im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Kunst at the Museum Marta, Herford (2011), squatting. erinnern, vergessen, besetzen at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (2010), MAN SON 1969. Vom Schrecken der Situation at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2009), Megastructure Reloaded at the Ehemalige Staatliche Münze, Berlin (2008), as well as Ideal City – Invisible Cities, at the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam and Zamosc, Poland (2006).

PETER SAUL: NEPTUNE AND THE OCTOPUS PAINTER
26 APRIL THROUGH 29 JUNE 2013
 
VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to present Neptune and the Octopus Painter, an exhibition of new works by Peter Saul. Saul is a vital and polarizing figure in post-war American art, a rare history painter whose ambivalent politics and lurid imagery make him difficult to categorize. He remains outside the canon yet continues to exert profound influence on younger generations of artists.
 
Peter Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934. Following his studies at both the California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis, Saul settled in Paris for six years. It was there, in the late 1950s, that his influences and obsessions - Mad magazine, 19th century academic French painting, Paul Cadmus and Rosa Bonheur - coupled with his total disbelief in the Existentialist artspeak of the time crystallized into a unique style. Saul‘s paintings of common household objects, rendered with an intense palette and a gesture reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, clearly anticipated Pop Art, a movement that would not emerge as such until 1962. His work rapidly progressed from quasi-abstract pictures of iceboxes and so-called ’pop‘ imagery to a caustic and unflinching take on contemporary history painting. Embracing humor, irony and the grotesque at a time when painting was supposed to be deadly serious, Saul’s work did not fit anywhere easily. In 1967, Saul said, “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture”, and it is with this attitude that he continues to satirize the political, social and cultural events of his time.
 
Neptune and the Octopus Painter features new large-scale works on canvas and a selection of recent works on paper, a body of work created during the past two years. Drawing as much on the imagery of Walt Disney as on traditions of classical painting, Saul's recent works again look to genres of history and self-portraiture, dissecting to humorous, gruesome and deliberately offensive effect, a range of subjects and attitudes.
 
Peter Saul presented his debut solo exhibition in Chicago in 1961 and has exhibited his work internationally since that time. His most recent solo museum exhibition was presented last year at Fondation Salomon, Alex, France. His works are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.
 
Peter Saul: Neptune and the Octopus Painter opens on Friday 26 April from 18:00 to 21:00. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM to 6PM. Please call the gallery or visit vwberlin.com for more information.

On the occasion of the six-year anniversary of the Arthur de Ganay Collection, recent acquisitions will be exhibited in a new context with works from the existing collection. Thus, with two works from Thomas Ruff's ma.r.s series - authorless NASA satellite images of the planet Mars which have been artistically manipulated – the scope of the photographic art is expanded considerably.
 
A new ensemble on the theme of abandoned places will be shown with works by Sarah Schönfeld, Laurenz Berges and Götz Diergarten. These works are drawn from a younger generation of fine art photographers who uphold the traditions of conventional photography while exploring new motives to achieve a markedly modern form of melancholy. A work from the In The Night series by artist Susanne Schuricht uses consistent abstraction and reduction of formal means stripped to their essence not to imitate reality, but rather to point beyond it. The landscapes of Elger Esser, the images of the Paris Opera by Candida Höfer, the interior photographs of Cologne Cathedral by Thomas Struth and the architectural shots by Hiroshi Sugimoto form further ensembles which are already considered classics of the collection.

MARTIN KIPPENBERGER: SEHR GUT | VERY GOOD
23 FEBRUARY - 18 AUGUST 2013
In 2013 Martin Kippenberger would have celebrated his 60th birthday - that is, had he not died in 1997 due to an excessive life. At several places in the building, the Hamburger Bahnhof currently exhibits an artist whose work and life cannot be separated from one another - a painter, an actor, a writer, a musician, a drunkard, a dancer, a traveller, a charmer, an enfant terrible and self-producer - in short, an “exhibitionist” as he called himself and an artist who today is considered one of the most significant of his generation. The permeation of personality and oeuvre, as well as the incredible variety of his artistic production, is now presented in its entire spectrum. “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” however does not intend to be a retrospective, but rather an approximation of both the private and public persona of the artist Martin Kippenberger. Even if Kippenberger only spent a few years in West-Berlin (1978-1981), it was here that he developed important topics of his artistic cosmos. Hence he announced that “Berlin needed a new coat of paint” and made a name for himself as a short-term co-owner of the legendary punk club SO36 and operator of the “Büro Kippenberger.” Besides performing as a musician in the band “Luxus” or respectively as an actor, he also once created for Claudia Skoda a floor collage as a catwalk for her Kreuzberg studio that he made from 1,300 photos from the fashion designer‘s environment. For the duration of the exhibition, the collage is shown in the historic passage in the East Wing. With the series “Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze” (1976-1977) he had still performed as a painter using oil and canvas, but in Berlin he traded large parts of this series for free food and drinks at the legendary Paris Bar (which he also then painted). With his series “Lieber Maler, Male mir” (1981) he shortly thereafter subverted the cliché of the genius painter by ordering large-format images from a movie poster painter. In spite of public indignations that Kippenberger repeatedly caused, with works such as “Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich” (1989) he managed to distil something positive.
 
A multiple installation - often referred to as “white paintings” (1991) and so far rarely shown - can be seen on the main building’s first floor: eleven white canvases that are embedded into the wall, virtually becoming one with it. Upon approaching the work one recognises glossy children‘s handwriting on the images, which quasi certifies Kippenberger’s work by grading it throughout with the mark “very good” - of course on request of the artist. Yet, “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” does not only refer to the white paintings but also to a magazine Kippenberger published in 1978 called “sehr gut. very good.”
 
In the midst of all this irony however the exhibition also reveals a human being who needed to combat his sickness through art. Kippenberger painted himself in the pose of the shipwrecked from Théodore Géricaults famous painting from 1819: bloated, aged, exhausted. Self-portrayal is in fact an essential part of his work and life, which is why there is an abundance of photographs and in particular self-portraits. A selection of photographs allows for a differentiated perspective of Kippenberger - thirty years after he left Berlin: “Art is always only looked at in retrospect anyway… I would say that the period is twenty years. […] Whatever the people will or will not continue to talk about me is what matters. Whether I spread good fun or not. And so what I'm working on is that the people will be able to say: Kippenberger was good fun!”
 
Curated by Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Co-Curator: Miriam Halwani