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.

The main work of Hans-Peter Feldmann consists of books. In our five Hans-Peter Feldmann solo
exhibitions since 1995 the focus has been repeatedly put on his bookwork – for example, in 1998 we showed in our gallery the book “Die Toten 1967 – 1993”. In the current exhibition we enfold the major part of his books extensively.

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
FIENE SCHARP
 
22 June 2013 - 26 July 2013
Opening: 21 June 2013, 6 pm
Venue: 401contemporary, Potsdamer Straße 81 B, Berlin (Tiergarten)
 
401contemporary is delighted to announce the first collaboration with young Berlin artist Fiene Scharp (1984) and present her solo exhibition I I I I I I I I I I I I I I in the gallery space on Potsdamer Strasse.
 
Fiene Scharp’s work is characterised by great clarity. The artist’s repetitive structures allow the elemental media of her works – paper, graphite, ink – to unfold their full organic materiality.
Scharp traces fine graphite lines so closely together on wood with the graphite creating a relief-like surface that it makes the work oscillate between drawing and object. For it is only through the close sequence that the surprisingly lively materiality of graphite becomes visible. Its subdivision into rectangles results in a shimmering grid of delicate horizontal and vertical linear fields of various densities, which looks like it has been engraved.
 
Scharp tackles graph paper with a fine scalpel, cutting out small, precise boxes. This makes the paper resemble woven fabric, the play of light and shadow revealing the full extent of its fragility.
Yet her pieces do not merely resemble woven material – Fiene Scharp actually weaves individual hairs together into a gossamer fabric, or attaches hairs at the nodes of a delicate grid, so that, like tactile sensors, they extend the drawing out into space.
 
The organic idiosyncrasy of the material as well as the intricate, time-consuming creation process are both at variance with the prescribed strictness and systematisation of a grid; moreover, they bypass the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality, between strictness of form and organicity, and between craftsmanship and serial production. It is this that gives Scharp’s Œuvre its special quality: using drawing techniques, she achieves the finest reliefs and sculptural plasticity.
Her art has a great deal in common with historical precursors of both Concrete Art and Minimalism. The theme of the grid in particular links Fiene Scharp to many classic positions – Agnes Martin’s clear drawings, for example, come to mind. Yet, at the same time, the artist also manages to call forth another side to this tradition. The obvious materiality of her drawings makes them a commentary and continuation in their own right.
 
Fiene Scharp (1984, Berlin) is fascinated by the constant repetition of the simplest geometric elements. By using and processing material such as paper, graphite, hair and ink her works develop an organic presence and vacillate between drawing and object. Scharp holds an MA in Fine Arts from the UdK Berlin were she did her “Meisterschüler” with Gregor Schneider in 2011. In 2012 she was honoured with the “Meisterschüler” award by the president of the UdK Berlin. She has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and participated in the highly acclaimed exhibition “Rasterfahndung – Das Raster in der Kunst nach 1945” at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Germany) in 2012. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I is Scharp’s first solo exhibition with 401contemporary, Berlin.

“Double Bound Economies” is about reading an East German photo archive. This non-institutional archive was created between 1967 and 1990 by the freelance photographer Reinhard Mende, who was commissioned by various GDR combines and the trade fair in Leipzig. “Double Bound Economies” takes the proclamation of internationalism of the socialist production as starting point to thematize its economies, schizophrenia, gestures, contradictions, as well as its staged images, spaces and displays.
The exhibition shows artistic interventions into the archive and contributions by Tekle Belete, KP Brehmer, Seiichi Furuya, Allan Sekula, Noël Burch, Olaf Nicolai and The Otolith Group. “Double Bound Economies” is curated by Estelle Blaschke, Armin Linke and Doreen Mende.

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