In Zusammenarbeit mit der Galerie im Einstein und der Galerie Villa Köppe zeigen am 15.Juni 2013 30 zeitgenössische Künstler ihre Werke im Oskar-Helene-Heim. Das zum Abriss freigegebene ehemalige Krankenhaus ist ein außergewöhnliches architektonisches Ensemble und 48 Stunden Bühne für 30 Künstler. Zum Rahmenprogramm gibt es Musik und eine Modenschau der jungen Modedesignerin Juli Cardoni. (www.julicardoni.com) Lassen Sie sich von der Atmosphäre des Ortes und der dort ausgestellten Kunst inspirieren. (Getränke vor Ort)
 
Vernissage: Samstag 15.Juni 2013, 16.00 Uhr - Finissage: Sonntag 16.Juni, 17.00 Uhr.
Adresse: Oskar-Helene-Heim, Clayallee 229, Einfahrt B, 14195 Berlin.

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

Works in the screening
PRESENCE OF MIND (IMAGING), 2011
AM ALIVE (INTERFACE), 2011
RE: I AM ALIVE (INTERFACE), 2012
 
For further details on the screening program please check the upcoming information on our website www.cruisecallas.com

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.

For further details on the screening program please check the upcoming information on our website www.cruisecallas.com

For further details on the screening program please check the upcoming information on our website www.cruisecallas.com

Annabelle Craven-Jones:
AFFECTIVE AUTO STREAM (LIVE CONSCIOUNESS), 2012
SOMEWHERE THERE IS THE SOUND OF SOMEONE THINKING
IN A WOOD (GREY NOISE INVERSE), 2012
PURE GREY LATITUDE SYNDROME (NORDIC), 2012
 
For further details on the screening program please check the upcoming information on our website www.cruisecallas.com

Alexandra Hopf:
Miami Noir, 2012
Illucid Cinema, 2010
...oder sollte dies eine unbekannte Mauer sein?, 2008/2009
 
For further details on the screening program please check the upcoming information on our website www.cruisecallas.com

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

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.