CANDYLAB
THOMAS FEUERSTEIN
 
26 April 2013 – 15 June 2013
Opening: 25 April, 18 pm
Venue: 401contemporary, Potsdamer Straße 81 B, Berlin (Tiergarten)
 
The examination of language as written text or spoken word forms the basis of Thomas Feuerstein’s works, which consist of translations, transformations and processes. His works incorporate both information and biotechnology to form communicating vessels and narrative networks and are realised in a variety of media, including drawings, sculptures and paintings. The processual sculptures featured in the exhibition CANDYLAB embody both symbolic and molecular transformations in an artistic manner.
 
For CANDYLAB, Thomas Feuerstein creates a setting that is part Viennese apartment and part laboratory. A mix of art nouveau furniture and bioreactors evokes associations with eating, reading, digestion and writing. At the heart of the exhibition is the processual sculpture PANCREAS, which gives bodily form to the books through biotechnical means.
 
PANCREAS (gr. pán = “all”, kréas = “flesh”) transforms language and literature, books and paper into sugar through the process of fermentation. The glucose (a simple sugar) produced from the cellulose of the books actually functions as a fuel in the CANDYLAB exhibition, which facilitates the growth of in vitro cultivated brain cells in a hand-blown glass brain. While the brain cells in the work PANCREAS are exclusively fed by Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit”, other types of books, like fiction, philosophy or cookbooks, produce the material for sugar glass, which then gives rise to sculptures and illustrations. When mixed with potassium nitrate, sugar extracted from science fiction books, for example, is transformed into rocket propellant for the sculpture IDEE (idea).
In its dual role as a work of art and technical function – a combination specific to Feuerstein – the glass sculpture SARKOPHAG (sarcophagus) produces alcohol from glucose.
 
As a source of energy and meaning, sugar draws from a variety of frames of reference, from biology and economics to capitalism and notions of paradise, to mythology and science. Sugar acts as a storage shed of narrative energy, which then entangles Feuerstein’s artistic methods of “conceptual narration” for us into real and artistic fictional stories. His “transformation machines”, which interweave scientific, social and economic realities into artistic narratives using conceptual aesthetic processes, set alchemistic cycles of production – both of meaning and potential – into motion.
 
Thomas Feuerstein (*1968, Innsbruck, Austria) studied art history and philosophy from 1987 to 1995 at the University of Innsbruck. Since 1997 he has had teaching assignments at various of Universities in Austria and Switzerland. Feuerstein’s work is created in a variety of media and includes installations, environments, objects, drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, video, audio dramas and internet art. Essential ingredients are the connection between linguistic and visual elements, the tracing of latent links between fact and fiction and the interlacing of art and science.

A Group of Six Artists
26.04.2013 — 15.06.2013
Like panel paintings that have lost their shape, in rows one behind another, hang two groups of vaulted and twisted rubber formations on a type of rack. Made up of warped geometric, black and white surfaces, the individual forms (or anti-forms) radiate a latently perverse sensuality. The sober, almost pedantic simplicity of “classical” Formalism is cracked open by the suggestive use of the rubber surfaces. As if in storage or a fashion house, the works hang on a rail and compacted together build a meta-work: “Hängung“ by Geerten Verheus.
 
The works of Vlado Martek are also located between anti-homage and homage. The exhibition owes it‘s title to the artist’s “Grupa šestorice” (Group of Six), which was founded in the middle of the 70s. (Alongside Martek, Mladen and Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović, Boris Demur, and Željko Jerman were also members of the Zagreb collective.) On roughly drawn maps of their respective countries are the names of famous musicians, poets and other quasi-state-approved creatives. Where Paris would be expected to be, Mallarmé found his place. Poland is dominated by Chopin. Art and context concur. As so often with Martek, banality and meaning can hardly be told apart from each other; a muddle of high culture and nonsense that sometimes can be seen to be political.
 
“Attributes of modification, relocated public sculpture (Hill Arches)” is an installation by Max Schaffer, which consists of printed large format tarpaulins that show a work by Henry Moore. Every winter, the “Hill Arches” on Karlsplatz in Vienna are encased in scaffolding for several months, and are replaced by pictures that show four views of the monumental bronze. In “A Group of Six Artists”, the views are interlaced and the surfaces translated into a spatial configuration in which back and front, inside and outside can hardly be distinguished from each other; and so the public sculpture is brought into relation with the gallery space.
 
The concentrated circle and circular segment forms in Michael Dreyer‘s pictures clearly testify to the crafted process of their formation. “Mistakes” are deemed acceptable and at times deliberately produced. The perfect form of the circle takes on a handwritten characteristic. Through the bringing together of different open as well as closed circles, which are drawn with the help of a thread or beam compass, pulsating constellations of compelling vitality are formed between mandala and tracery, form and shape, painting, mechanics and handwriting.
 
With Channa Horwitz and Luis Camnitzer, two important figures of early Conceptual Art are represented in “A Group of Six Artists”. Since the beginning of the 1960s, graphic sheet music and notations of movement and sounds (“Sonakinatographies”) are at the centre of Horwitz’s work. On a foundation of logical order, time is fixed in the medium of drawing and is translated into graphic rhythms and serial structures. Until today, equally strict and exact, and in the limits of the self-implemented order, playful compositions are formed.
 
The Installation ”S.S. Atlantus" by Luis Camnitzer is made up of three elements; a large scale print of a postcard with the image of a wrecked ship, a concrete block which sits on the bottom of a bowl of water and a brass plate on which in simple words the following is written: “S.S. Atlantus. Remains of experimental concrete ship, one of twelve during World War I. Proved impractical after several transatlantic trips because of weight. Towed and sunk here as wharf in 1926.” As if fallen from time, the “Atlantus” tells of dreams of the past, the wrong ways of modern technology, and the hubris from before the devastating war. Close to the shore, not so far away, floats a simple small rowing boat, which appears to melancholically wink at the tired monstrosity.
 
For further information please contact Aanant & Zoo.

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.

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

DUVE Berlin is pleased to present Die Grünen Löwen an exhibition of new work by Jen DeNike.
 
For her second solo exhibition at the gallery DeNike embarks on a journey that is born out of a mythical tale of historic orighttp://www.duveberlin.com/exhibitions/1446/press-releasein, spinning a narrative that the audience will experience in a durational live performance.
 
In the heyday of discovery, a team of German archaeologists found, in an ancient temple, 107 young women wrapped in white linen. They lay in two long rows, their bodies tightly entwined. A girl with a gold ribbon in her hair lays at the head of one row, a girl with a silver ribbon at the head of the other. To this day, the significance of the ribbons remains a mystery. Why were only two ribbons found? What ritual, long forgotten, had taken place here? Were they favored by gods or by men? Was gold dearer than silver. Or, forever obscured by the secret hierarchy of lost religions, were the maidens adorned merely because they lay at the head of their long lines of lovers?
 
Medieval alchemists were interested in transmutation of non-organic base materials, substances, into more exalted materials such as gold. The inner practice of alchemy, involves the transformation of the individual from the unconscious raw being into a form of enlightened consciousness.
 
Gold is a perfect body, engendered of argent-vive, pure, fixed, clear, red and of sulphur - clean, fixed, red, and not burning. Gold is satisfied, and wants nothing.
 
Silver is a body - clean, pure, and almost perfect - begotten of argent-vive - pure, almost fixed, clear, and white. It is of such like as sulphur - it wants nothing, save a little fixation, color, and weight.
 
A green liquid sulfate called “vitriol” purifies the matter, leaving behind gold.
 
Gold is the sun - silver is the moon. One plus seven equals eight. Eight is the lion. The lion is the sun. The green lion eats the sun, the green lion purifies, and the green lion consumes all.
 
The Die Grünen Löwen performance consists of an impressive cast of maiden girls and will be accompanied by a selection of collaged linen on wooden boards, and a series of gold and silver photographic works, including a special limited edition vinyl 45’ Single LP entitled “Gold/Silver” in collaboration with composer Orson Sieverding and the mezzo soprano opera singer Anna Katherina Hilpert. The recording of Richard Strauss’ “Die Nacht”, where the night famously steals the beloved from the lover, and Sieverding’s original bassline driven beat track will premiere at the opening reception and will be played throughout the exhibition.
 
Faced with our often ambiguously perceived human state of the duality of the male and female, DeNike thrives for a meditative state that bridges the gap to conceive the unity - as one. Like Isis and Osiris, children of Geb and Nut: the process of continuity, the circle, is key in most of her work. Two poles in movement yearning to overcome what has been lost. The longing for serenity - the search for being whole, aimed at through an allegoric rite de passage of procedural change of the basic substance matters from chaos to order. This meditative process can be partly understood when we split the works into their basic powers, their cautiously interwoven narrative elements and look at what they reveal to us. Water, silver, gold, the moon, the sun, the color white, the circle - all are representatives of a deeper symbolic meaning that meanders in a reverberating current throughout DeNike's oeuvre. Are the maidens in the performance asleep akin to Shakespeare’s Juliet? Are they hovering above ground on their way out of this profane world into a higher state of sacred life? Are they laid down to rest? What are they waiting for? Or are we awaiting them to come to protect us with their wisdom? Is it us we see parting and shifting, embarking into the next world, like Rê would have crossed the nightly sky on his Mondbarke? The synthesis that DeNike explores with help of these Stellvertreter allows us a glimpse into another world. We may not be able to put our finger on it, but if we are to allow ourselves to perceive with all our senses, DeNike’s work opens up to a world that contains magical knowledge of the prima materia, greater than the earthly worlds. A different kind of knowledge that feeds from secrets handed down over generations in the family of seers.
 
*
 
Jen DeNike (1971) lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Bard College. Her work has been internationally exhibited including; Museum of Modern Art; MOMA/PS1; Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf; Deichtorhallen Hamburg, KW - Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; AutoCenter Berlin, The Brooklyn Museum; CCS Bard; Miami Art Basel: Art Public; Tensta Konsthall, Sweden; Performa Biennial; CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; MACRO Roma, Experimenta Biennial Australia; MOMA Shanghai, Mendes Wood Sao Paulo, Anat Ebgi Los Angeles. She recently presented Lolita, Lo a site commissioned video and performance with LAND in Los Angeles curated by Shamim Momim. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Il Giardino dei Lauri Collection.

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.

Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present new works by Šejla Kamerić.
 
The four-channel video installation SHIFT is Šejla Kamerić’s most recent film which will be premiered in it’s single-channel version at the Sarajevo Film Festival this summer.
 
A young man gets up every morning before dawn to pick up the freshly printed newspaper and delivers it by bike. Not minding the early hour nor the endeavour of climbing hundreds of steps, each single roll of newspaper is being delivered directly to the individual households. A young woman, wanting to become an actress seeks the challenge to take up the role of the man and carries out his routine. Both characters in the film as well as their actions are non-fictional and are based on real activities. They happen on a voluntary basis, out of a personal inner drive.
 
Why do people do what they do, pushing their limits every day? Why are we doing voluntarily something that causes discomfort, pain, stress, or even humiliations. Pleasure of success is a too simple answer for such frequent questions.
 
With her film SHIFT Šejla Kamerić opens a discourse questioning the concept of efficiency and profit supposedly inevitable for a functional society. This concept has become highly disputable especially in the past years. The question is rather: couldn´t it also be the righteousness and/or the selflessness that drives people to advocate for society’s equilibrium?
 
Also part of the exhibition is the photo installation June is June everywhere (self-portrait), which consists of hundreds of hand-printed black and white pictures, depicting a wall with bullet holes. It is the outside wall of the artist’s bedroom, exactly where her head rests while she is sleeping.
 
Šejla Kamerić born 1976 in Sarajevo, lives and works in Sarajevo and Berlin.
 
Her first short film WHAT DO I KNOW, premiered in Corto Cortissimo section of (64th) Venice International Film Festival and circulated over 40 film festivals winning the Golden Pram for the Best Short Film at (5th) Zagreb Film Festival and (15th) Adana Film Festival. Her first feature length film 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED premiered at Manchester International Festival, and was screened at numerous festivals and museums, including Sarajevo Film Festival, Istanbul Modern, MACBA and Metropolitan Museum of Tokyo.
 
Selected solo exhibitions: Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; MSUM Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah Art Museum – March Meeting, Sharjah (2012); MACBA, Barcelona; No More Drama, Röda Sten, Göteborg; Prospectif Cinema, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); What do I know, DAAD Galerie, Berlin; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2008); Brand New, The Kosova Art Gallery – Museum Priština and EXIT Gallery (2006), Priština; Closed, Zemaljski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo (2005); Others and Dreams, Portikus, Frankfurt a. M. (2004).
 
Selected group exhibitions: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (2013); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju; La La La Human Steps, Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Istanbul; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech (2012); Glück happens, Städtische Galerie, Erlangen (2010); Squatting, Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin (2009), Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2009); ZEIGEN. An Audio Tour Through Berlin, Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin (2009); Windows upon Oceans – 8. Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, Szczecin (2009).

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

Junggeun OH has been living in Berlin since 2005 and working continuously on his topic of The Interspaces.
Another exciting chapter of his intense work is presented at galerie son from 18 May to 13 July, 2013.
What Oh shows is consequent: he now brings into shape even the canvasses, cuts out and puts in the interspaces, reduces and abstracts.
Beside several motives from Berlin, this time Böttcherstraße in Bremen and the Basel Art Fair Building also became objects of his aesthetic view.

 
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.

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

Florian Fausch
“Sollbruchstelle”
1. Juni – 6. Juli 2013,
Vernissage am 31. Mai (18 – 21 Uhr)
 
Bei Florian Fausch verschmelzen Aspekte der individuellen Erfahrung im städtischen Kontext mit Referenzen auf mediale Ästhetik und digitale Welten. Nicht von Ungefähr lassen sich auf die Arbeiten von Florian Fausch Termini aus dem Film anwenden, besonders das Genre des Science Fiction, aber auch digitale Szenarien aus animierten Computerspielen, sind ihm bestens vertraut. So knüpft der Maler auch an dort geläufige Raum-Metaphern an, bei denen Brüche und Sprünge offen legen, dass die Bindung an die Zeit die isotrope Raumvorstellung zwangsläufig relativiert. So fasst der Betrachter in seinen Bildern nicht verlässlich Fuß, denn der schollenartig aufgesprengte Grund, zwischen dem unverhofft Abgründe klaffen, lässt symbolisch das Gehen zum Abenteuer werden.
Scheinbar Unvereinbares findet in der malerischen Balance seiner Bilder einen temporären Ausdruck für das fragmentarische und zitathafte Lebensgefühl einer jungen Künstlergeneration, das nicht mehr durch das Postulat einer widerspruchlosen Verortung einlösbar ist.

“I will have to find out who is right, society or myself” [1]
 
The Jette Rudolph Gallery is very pleased to present the first Berlin solo show of Leipzig artist Corinne von Lebusa (*1978; Herzberg).
 
Lebusa’s paintings and exhibition pieces magnetically attract the viewer through the clarity of their color and compositional accents despite the fact that they are small-scale watercolor paintings done on fragile cardboard, a material that in turn calls for the protective housing of a picture frame. In terms of her stylistic repertoire, the artist’s work varies between figuration, abstraction and work that is strictly textual, where brushstrokes formulate gentle, curving forms, and assertive statements that span the entire image such as “Ich bin der Sinn des Lebens” (“I am the meaning of life”) are charmingly communicated to the reader.
 
With provocative verbal statements and contrast-rich composition and color interplay, Corinne von Lebusa experiments with today’s culture and the phenomenon of showing. Things constantly surface facial expressions, gestures or actions between people which, in an indeterminate pictorial space, demand some type of narrative or logical ordering. Fragmented into what look like scenes or broken up into abstract forms, the various paintings are autonomous projections that aren’t mimetically based on real examples. Instead, they test the viewer’s conditioned gaze and his or her notion of the medium of the painting.
 
The special emphasis in Lebusa’s works on the act of pointing, which is really what constantly captures the recipient’s attention, is ultimately rooted in the use of gestures. Frequently evoked in her work, these gestures are at the “[origin] of human communication” [2] and today, as an information-carrying sign, play a special role in advertising and the media.
 
The at times symbolically charged visualization of the act and effect of pointing is created by symbols that include arrows and extended fingers, or by acts of disclosure and concealment in the form of stark nakedness or something hidden behind a scarf, mask or hair. In this way, the artist undermines the stringent causality that might otherwise accompany the act of showing and creates an artificial reality in the painting’s projection field, thereby alienating the things and people that act and appear in the image, “… as if they were traces of that which is shown.” [3] Corinne von Lebusa loves annoying her viewers and those who read her paintings, and she loves doing this by invoking today’s widespread “picture mythology”, “which in a hymn-like way glorifies the picture as an acting subject…” [4]
 
By alternating between free abstract or textual forms and traditional representational portraits or collages, Lebusa’s work impressively oscillates between intuition and ratio. In the tension between abstraction and mimesis, between painting and object, the artist’s works move freely in a transcendental area characterized by motif recognition and an emphasis on the means used to create the picture. Unlike figurative or scenic representations, the artist’s abstract form-vocabulary synthesizes in such a way that mental processes are depicted. So by combining signs of emotional states and inner truths with reality-based painting genres, Lebusa is able to construct a visual, aesthetic reality. With her works, the artist presents subjective images of the world and uses the pictorial space as a place to present fragmentary views of her image of humanity, which can hardly be understood rationally: She raises questions of identity and explores the process of inventing oneself, doing so through themes of femininity, sexuality, philosophy and artificiality. With accents created by: 1) the gentle contours of a sometimes ornamental formal language; 2) the bright colors with their gentle, almost “makeup-like” transitions; 3) and the fragile, abstract, cardboard collages that have been carefully assimilated, these works convey specific notions of femininity that not only have a polarizing, unconventional and honest effect, but a wild, ironic, aggressive and uncompromising one as well, thereby ultimately always opposing the notion of a self-contained system.
 
In the current exhibition, the compelling scene-like representations of several figures in the room engaged in actions, either together or alongside one another, these increasingly give way to a focus on the following: the individual figure, the autonomous, abstract, winding bands and tubes of color, and simple motif-and-text combinations. In Lebusa’s paintings, dialog and the clear-cut juxtaposition of man and woman powerfully fuse, creating a multi-part, wall-filling portrait series on “… archetypes with faces where the genders blur. It is no longer about man and woman but about being in itself.” [5]
 
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1 Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen: Nora oder Ein Puppenheim, 1879.
2 Vgl. Michael Tomasello, Die Ursprünge der menschlichen Kommunikation, 2009.
3 Vgl. Lambert Wiesing, Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens, 2013, S. 228.
4 Ebd., S.42.
5 Ebd., S. 76.
6 Lu Potemka zu den Arbeiten der Künstlerin: Ich fühle, also bin ich, 2013 (unpubl.).

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present Monica Bonvicini‘s Disegni – the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery – over the coming Gallery Weekend. An extensive body of works from the last thirteen years is being shown for the first time in Berlin. They afford an insight into the artist’s complex, multifarious production of textual images, cut-outs, assemblages and drawings – works which have both emerged as an accompaniment to her installation output and have been created as independent productions in their own right.
The exhibition title evokes first of all associations with the universal geniuses of the Renaissance, with ‘disegno’ as both drawing and blue-print, source of inspiration and work-plan, for all-round artists-cum-architects. Above all, however, what are deployed in Bonvicini’s referential games are the experimental techniques of the artistic and literary (neo-)avant-gardes of the past century – for instance the collage as montage principle. The sheets on display reveal that here is an artist who systematically employs drawing as a conceptual medium.
 
With its rich-colour tempera strokes and correction tape, the triptych Untitled (Harness) (2006) shows body harnesses from Bonvicini’s hanging installation Identify Protection (2006), the pitch-black tempera seen oozing from the arrester loop eyelet in the hip and stomach area accentuating the SM connotations. Black is also the colour of the organic-seeming daubs in the 60“ series, which offers a fresh take on Lawrence Weiner’s gesture in his ‘Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can’ (1968). Bonvicini’s experimental order refers to the chassis paint colours of the eponymous car manufacturers (e.g. 60“ Ford, 60“ Fiat, 60“ BMW).
 
Tempera and spray paint are also the constituents of the large-scale, hovering detached house facades in Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes (2007), works created on the basis of photos taken by the artist in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In Off the Grid (2011-2012), diagonal wavy lines criss-cross the large-format work in a manner that takes the title at its word – they counteract the grid as a trope of modernism.
Bonvicini’s strategy of the fetishistic inversion of all male-connoted work-tools from (the construction) industry expresses itself above all in language games with props derived from the day-to-day culture of late-capitalist, post-industrial societies. In some series, the slogans and theorems of architects are alienated by word collages of the artist’s own creation. In Architecture is … (2002), the artist pithily completes Bernard Tchumi’s rambling quote on the nature of architecture as ultimate erotic act. The large-format tempera drawings gathered together as Untitled (2006) portray construction workers with their work-tools. They are based on photographs acquired via a Google search under the search heading ‘construction workers’.
 
The medium of drawing takes on greater density through the method of montage – especially when Bonvicini adds new levels of representation which restrain and hamper customary narratives via an element of disorientation and disruption. In the series Untitled (Betrayal) (2002), which was a working template for the stage set to Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, bodily fragments of lovers appear like captive prisoners in the cold, grid-shapes of the scenery.
 
Bonvicini’s drawings combine signs in a manner that confuses and confounds formal and narrative conventions, arousing feelings of both pleasure and aversion in the beholder. One example would be the mental short-circuit caused by combining a hammer-impact drill shot through with line compactions and the pornography-born concept of a ‘Blind Shot’ in the work of that title; another would be Blind Date (2004), where the artist brings the well-known term into association with an electric handsaw.
 
Alongside the shifting of conventional signifiers which can generally be ascribed to visual poetry, the prominent feature of these and other word-pictures is finally the recourse to modes of graphic design, for example the use of striking letter stencils. For the 24-part series Run (2000) Bonvicini collected songs, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s, in whose titles the word ‘run’ appeared, and transposed her selection onto tracing paper by means of stencilling letters. The song-titles initiate a semantic play on variations which reverberates in the beholder’s mind. Alongside ‘Burn to run’, Bonvicini’s brutal version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to run’, the cheesy dead-end hopelessness of Tanya Tucker’s ‘Can’t run from yourself’ resonates all the more strongly as the visitor leaves the exhibition.
 
Monica Bonvicini (*1965, Venice) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin and at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Since 2003 she has been professor of performing arts and sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been Desire Desiese Devise at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, A BLACK HOLE OF NEEDS, HOPES AND AMBITIONS at Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Málaga, Spain and BOTH ENDS at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. She participated in numerous international well-known group shows, most recently at the Belvedere, 21er Haus, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany and in fall 2013 at Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington. Monica Bonvicini was awarded with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 1999 and she was honoured with the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin 2005.
Text: Elena Zanichelli
Translation: Richard Humphrey