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until 21.02. | #1742ARTatBerlin | galerie gerken presents from 8th Dezember 2017 the group exhibition “natural space” with artworks by six artists.
This year’s thematic exhibition is dedicated to the traditional motif of landscape in painting, drawing and graphics, which should provide an insight into the contemporary approach to that genre. Through their works, the participating artists reveal the potential of depictions of nature in the broadest sense, whereby fundamental questions of composition and material as well as current debates in our lifeworld are addressed and reflected. The different artistic approaches show the range of motives and the versatility of the genre, giving the tradition a contemporary legitimacy.
Participating artists: Tinka Bechert ∙ Julia Benz ∙ Carla Chan ∙ Tegene Kunbi ∙ Dieter Mammel ∙ Yannick Riemer
Within the paintings by Tinka Bechert fundamental questions regarding the medium and its means are posed. Due to her extraordinary sensitivity for colour and composition Bechert offers a multilayered dimension of content next to a pure aesthetical sensation. Amongst others the former is nurtured by a diversity of time and life perceptions whereas Berlin as her city of birth and the west coast of Ireland as her chosen home can be identified as crucial influences. In the context of this exhibition Bechert reflects her relationship as a painter to the Irish landscape which provides the air and space necessary and transforms into the artistic subject within this process.
Julia Benz’ paintings celebrate the borderline between everyday visible and mystical seclusion. Both worlds of experience are not mutually exclusive, but influence each other dynamically, creating fine intermediate levels and distant horizons of interpretation. The apparentness and disguise, the concrete form and the abstract dissolution go hand in hand in Benz’s paintings and celebrate the ambivalence as a contextual and compositional occasion, allowing the viewer to connect with known forms and immediately let them fall into a bottomless cosmos of color.
The series of prints Clouded White by Carla Chan are comprised of glue screen-printed on paper, which has then been partially covered with carbon powder. This process reveals the glue-images whilst simultaneously capturing the motion of the powder across the paper, freezing a moment in time. Clouded White are shots taken on a digital camera during the first encounter the artist had with nature, in Sweden. Shooting the darkness of the night – when the eyes fail to see – the camera captured the hidden structures of the nocturnal landscape. The experience of feeling confronted with nature, lost in the obscurity of the night, with only the imagination left to think about what’s out there, is being translated into the physicality of the prints. The computer made the landscapes captured by the camera visible, leaving a noticeable grain which is reflected in the structure of the carbon powder.
The abstract paintings by Tegene Kunbi develop their full power out of the tension between plan geometric forms and a complex structure in depth. Layer over layer the intensive color stripes bear witness to the artistic process of Kunbi: The previous pictorial moment is almost completely covered by a new layer, but does not lose its presence by shimmering through the following color stripe, in a symbiotic mixture with the new shade or as a haptic event at the edge of the plane. With the opportunity to reconstruct this processuality the paintings offer an insight to their narrative and temporary composition.
Dieter Mammel presents his largest format of canvas so far in the context of this exhibition. A size of three by five meters the water landscape extends monumentally over the wall offering the observer to become himself part of the wave. Oscillating between abstract disillusion of form and naturalistic expression Mammel contemplates widely on the relationship of men and sea. The water arises overwhelmingly and intriguingly at once to an impregnable force confronting the individual that begins to disappear amongst the wide plane of colour. It still keeps the head above water apparently confirming the order of power though in times of a massive destruction of the environment this condition keels over at the same moment. Mammel reflects on this dilemma in his sensitive and powerful aesthetics. With this work he offers an immersion into the contradictions of our actions.
Within his series CAVE CANEM ~BIN~ Yannick Riemer deals with landscape as an isolated sphere of privacy. He confronts our liberal image of a pure and wide nature with a different perspective. The landscape as a whole gets fragmented by the human need to declare property and define borders for it. Behind the own tiny fence an autarkic world forms and appropriates an autonomous language. Riemer traces the development and transformation of the communication and its chosen symbols. He interlaces forms and information to an extend that the process of generating truth can be reconstructed. Abstracting the multilayered modes of interpretation is the method in content and aesthetics proving the complexity of individual lines of sight on every little piece of earth.
Vernissage: Friday, 08th December 2017, 06.00 – 09.00 p.m.
Exhibition period: Friday, 08th December 2017 to Wednesday, 21st February 2018
Artist Talks:
Tinka Bechert – 27th January 2018, 6 p.m.
Yannick Riemer – 03rd February 2018, 6 p.m.
Julia Benz – 03rd February 2018, 7 p.m.
Dieter Mammel – 17th Februay 2018, 6 p.m.
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Image caption: via galerie gerken
Contemporary Art in Berlin: natural space – galerie gerken | ART at Berlin
