Moritz Scheper

• 

  picks August 23, 2021

  Thomas Jeppe

  Frames serve a hybrid function as both delimitations and integral parts of the images they bound. For the past several years, Thomas Jeppe has painted the bottom halves of his wooden frames white, both underscoring and leveling their relation to the wall. Each of the twelve large-format paintings on view here also partakes of the same narrative frame: An anthropomorphized pig finds a pig mask, puts it on, sets out into the world, and has various adventures before meeting a little pig in a pigpen and taking it home, where they fall asleep. Jeppe’s innocent style, appropriated from children’s-book

• 

  picks June 03, 2021

  Simon Mielke

  There’s a peculiar temperature in Simon Mielke’s debut at Lucas Hirsch. The intimate show, consisting of four drawings and two larger paintings (all works untitled, 2021), is full of generic imagery, but never comes across as cold or distanced. On the contrary, it exudes a reserved warmth. The two paintings, hung close beside one another, show nothing more than sections of empty rooms, such as those one finds by the million on real estate portals. However, Mielke painted them with swift, allusive strokes that allow the mundane subject matter to carry an intimate, diaristic charge. The canvases

• 

  picks December 05, 2019

  “The End of Expressionism”

  The raw image of an ash heap in Sokol Beqiri’s photograph The End of Expressionism: Painted by a Madman, 2001, is clearly visible even from outside the gallery. The work is displayed on a central wall and serves as both an aesthetic statement and a challenge to the traditional frameworks of aesthetics. Upon closer observation, the abstracted mass reveals itself to be a horrific documentary image of human ashes, from civilians during the Kosovo War. If Beqiri’s choice of imagery questions and pushes the ethics of representation, it’s an apt starting point for an exhibition that brings together

• 

  picks October 15, 2019

  Kinke Kooi

  The Dutch artist Kinke Kooi’s drawings, informed by a complementary beach-house color palette and featuring elements of collage, initially come across as an expressive upgrade of Ernst Haeckel’s depictions of nature. To a certain extent, this is accurate, except all of Kooi’s plants seem to originate from the Garden of Desire. Grotesque of raising (2), 2018, for instance, stars a bean pod burst open from the abundance of growing peas, while its white blooms extend their chalices toward the full moon. Enveloped in a tender embrace with a fleshy, milky membrane, the central tendril is further

• 

  picks September 30, 2019

  Mathis Gasser

  A great deal of art produced in recent years has attempted to address the destructive potential of finance capital, but rarely have the results gone beyond cheap polemic. The mechanisms and political implications of that world—and our entanglement in it—are difficult to grasp, much less illustrate, but the Swiss painter Mathis Gasser has found an indirect and striking strategy for approaching the subject. Noticing that spaceships have come into particular vogue in science-fiction films since the 2008 global financial crisis, he has reconstructed “Big Dumb Objects” (a term coined by the British

• 

  picks June 02, 2017

  Arne Schmitt

  As is often the case with Arne Schmitt’s photographs, the selection of them here can be mistaken, at first glance, for architecture photography. But his sober black-and-white works, which combine an engagement with architecture and city planning in low-key compositions without gimmicks, go far beyond that. In this exhibition, the shots are the tip of an iceberg of invisible research activity.

  The series “In new Splendor,” 2017, examines the built heritage of an insurance group in the northwest of Cologne’s city center, which Schmitt reveals to be the point of intersection for different discourses.

• 

  picks March 15, 2017

  Michael Krebber

  Over the course of his three-decade career, Michael Krebber has successfully adopted postures of refusal that render him an almost Bartleby-esque figure at times. Nonetheless, his current midcareer retrospective in Bern dispenses with these strategies and allows viewers a comprehensive overview of his work.

  Even though several installations are on display in this show, titled “The Living Wedge,” Krebber insists upon the painting component of his practice and succeeds in bringing attention to his canvases. The logic of seriality, which, more than anything else, characterizes Krebber’s method in

• 

  picks December 05, 2016

  Joëlle Tuerlinckx

  For Joëlle Tuerlinckx, the making and showing of art are connected in an inherently infinite circle. In her latest exhibition, “Nothing for Eternity,” she breaks through institutional authority. Here, the artist stages the ground floor of the museum as a site of experimental activity and assembly—in short, as a studio. Appropriately, the final gallery of the show is completely lined with silver chocolate wrappers, which naturally evokes Billy Name’s design for the Factory. Beyond this, the silver foil draws a correlation between the chocolate-producing countries of Switzerland and Tuerlinckx’s

• 

  picks November 29, 2016

  Ines Doujak

  Ines Doujak had a reputation for making aggressively explicit work well before her sculpture Not Dressed for Conquering / HC 04 Transport, 2010––which depicted a former Spanish king copulating with a dog––cost three people their jobs at MACBA last year. It is not unusual for Doujak’s work to mine the intersection of textiles, fashion, and violence, as well as globalized relations of production, power and colonialism. It is therefore surprising that her solo exhibition in Stuttgart, also titled “Not Dressed for Conquering,” seems somewhat reserved throughout, even though Doujak does not shy away

• 

  picks June 13, 2016

  Yngve Holen

  No matter where the German-Norwegian sculptor Yngve Holen’s works have been seen in recent years, they always focus on the pressure exerted by high-tech machines on a curiously absent human body. Even this solo exhibition “VerticalSeat”––named for the notion of a cheap airline offering only standing seats in order to squeeze more passengers onto a plane––demonstrates once again how technology looks back at its creator. Factory-fresh headlights for buses or motor scooters turn into a series of four works titled “Hater Headlight” (all works 2016), hateful-looking techno-fetish items placed as