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

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

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.

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.