“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.

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.

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.

ZAK | BRANICKA Gallery is pleased to present “the weight of 8”, our first exhibition of Marlena Kudlicka‘s work. Specially prepared for the gallery space, the artist has created an installation consisting of three objects along with a narrative, the key to which is the title of the exhibit. “The weight of 8” is a description of the relationship between space and language. The artist says that “Letters and words serve to describe a space, while numbers do the same for its measurements. Words are not, however, capable of precisely expressing something, as they constitute a subjective evaluation, yet numbers code precision. I join both forms in a new language.”
 
The first component of “the weight of 8” is an installation constructed of metal letters and numbers. It looks like a piece of DIN A4 paper that has been proportionally enlarged to fit the height of the display space, but, due to a coding error, all of the characters have been garbled, creating an abstract visual composition. The second component is a hanging sculpture that was created based on the exact measurements of the dimensions of the gallery. It is a kind of abstract “algorithm” that visualizes mathematical operations, without describing them with characters or numbers. The sculpture is made of metal elements of varying thickness and is based on the principle of counterpoint: the weight of some elements is distributed to the exterior with the help of other elements. The steel object that connects the first two components has two meanings. The first comes from mathematics (statistical calculations), as the object has the shape of an enlarged I-beam, the load bearing construction element that was introduced into architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The second meaning comes from language: the cross section of the object is simply a large letter “I” and it carries specific semantic meanings: in Polish it means “and”; in English “I”; and it is also the Roman numeral 1.
 
All of the pieces of the installation are based on the relationship between letters, numbers, and punctuation, as well as matter and its weight. Everything is important here, including the thickness and type of materials, and the finish. Even the color is derived from mathematical calculations. So, what does the “eight” in the title weigh (estimated visually), and what is its color? In order to calculate them, it is enough to read the title-equation out loud: the letter “w” is present in the first word, but not the second. A proportion of 50% black to 50% white gives us the gray.
 
Kudlicka is particularly interested in the relationship between precision and error: her sculptures are made with a jeweler’s precision, but at the same time an error is factored into the process of their creation. This relationship leads to a balance—the main theme of the exhibition—not only between, for example, numbers and the written word, or dimensions and color, but also the balance of weights. Her sculptures are based on statistical calculations, which is why they seem to float on air, and why we doubt the force of gravity when looking at them, or walk around them on tiptoes.
 
Kudlicka‘s work follows in the tradition of constructivist art. Just as Katarzyna Kobro, the forerunner of Polish avant-garde art, she also derives her sculptures from architecture. Kudlicka says that “In this project I refer to the peripheral areas of architecture, as well as to the construction process. My inspiration was a trip to Beirut and the suburbs of Cairo, but also the 1970s in my native Poland, where, in a situation of constant systemic political change, temporariness and a lack of stability were a permanent part of architecture. Most often this was a result of improvisation and limited access to building materials; so this whole temporary architecture became a ’monument of errors.‘ In illegally erected buildings, construction elements that leaned on each other were balanced in accordance with the principle of counterpoint. Of course this was all inevitably predestined to be fragile, and this interested me the most. In what way does fragility activate a space? Does it play a primary or secondary role? Why are certain places felt to be weak points, or can fragility, perhaps, be seen as a temporary state between instability and scarcity on the one hand, and effectiveness and function on the other?”
 
Language is also a key element in Kudlicka’s work; the title is always an integral part of her art. Friedrich Meschede writes that “Focusing on the title reveals a crucial core of Marlena Kudlicka’s work. She refers to concrete poetry, a term that can be ascribed to both literature and the fine arts, which transforms the flowing transitions between the medium of language, its visualization using letters as a pictorial form, and sounds as concepts of rhythm into a complex system. The rigid guidelines of grammar turn into a new order through a playful disregard of grammatical regularity. The combinatorics of opposites, and elements that would not initially be thought of as going together, is the technique of collage used for concrete poetry. The vocabulary of construction creates the surprise.”

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