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until 28.05. | #3894ARTatBerlin | FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (FWR) shows on 28. April 2023 the exhibition Falling Apart by the artist Christine Streuli.
“At the moment, a lot of things feel like decay to me. But maybe afterwards people will say: That was in truth the rise to something completely new. Or: We were still doing comparatively well then. Who knows.”
(Dietrich Brüggemann, director, screenwriter and musician in an interview with Marcus Klöckner on the occasion of his new novel “Materialermüdung”, 2022)
For gallery weekend berlin at the end of April 2023, the artist CHRISTINE STREULI (CH, born 1975), newly represented by our gallery, will transform the exhibition spaces into an immersive experiential space with her delicate pictorial weavings and their all the more intense luminosity. Paint is sprayed, slapped off, and monuental stickers self-referentially quote painting on canvas and at the same time demonstratively banish it to the wall. As if to capture a moment before it disintegrates, falls apart, disappears … Welcome to the exhibition “Falling Apart (long version)” by Christine Streuli!
The artist Christine Streuli knows about the special power of color, its intensity as well as expressivity and its beauty and uses it consciously – iconic as well as emotional. Streuli’s 2007 appearance at the Venice Biennale is unforgettable, when she made the rooms of the Swiss Pavilion virtually vibrate with her all-over gesture of murals, canvases and monotypes. Her subsequent solo shows at the Museum of Art Lucerne and Haus am Waldsee (both 2013), Berlinische Galerie (2017), Museum Folkwang Essen (2018) or Kunstmuseum Thun (2020) thrilled visitors due to their intense energy of a strongly moving canon of form and color and their pictorial signs of explosion, gesture, speed and color temperature.
Streuli rarely works with the classic painting tool of the brush-rather, she prints, sprays, pours, or splashes paint onto her canvases. In her latest series of works, with picture titles such as “Auseinanderfallen” (“Falling Apart”), the accomplished artist consciously counteracts her calculation and experience – and opts for chance. Thus, she uses the technique of copying, also known from the painting of surrealist Max Ernst (1891-1976), to create free, unknown forms and structures.
“The theme of touch and the absence of touch interests me here. I hardly touch the canvas. It was sprayed from a distance and paint via carrier slapped off. (…) The paint skin that has been transferred here has a final and outlandish effect, as if the canvas were shedding its skin, a kind of peeling.” (C.S., 03/2023)
This skinning, peeling idea means the shedding of a given surface with the desire of renewal. But what does the painting want to get rid of? If one looks through the layers of paint at the underlying composition-determining forms, geometric patterns are discernible, which in their prism-like light dark alternation are reminiscent of iridescent spaces in the manner of Op Art. Towards the center of the picture, the logic of constructivism is lost and undergoes a metamorphosis into indefinable forms that evoke associations with the representational, vegetative or animal. The process of the “falling apart” of the forms, which culminates in the middle, is outshone by a luminous colorfulness. It diffuses completely freely and contourlessly from the center of the picture to the edges. The color transition from pink to orange to bright yellow is powdery and light, almost immaterial, and creates an atmospheric mood on the surface of the picture. And as in the coloristic color clouds of Dutch (landscape) painting of the 16th/17th century, a metaphor for the emotional and ethical is transported in the luminous ether of Streuli’s paintings.
While the artist Christine Streuli tended in her painting of the 2000s to an energetic, almost revolutionary act of exploding the boundaries of the image and the (architectural) space, today these boundaries have become more permeable. The newfound freedoms create new options. But they also etch at the surface of identity, wounds, family, protection, security. Combative as ever, Streuli celebrates her painting as a place of truth, freedom and longing.
CHRISTINE STREULI (b. 1975 in Bern, CH) lives and works in Berlin. Since 2015 she teaches as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. In spring 2017, the artist was awarded the Fred Thieler Prize of the Berlinische Galerie and had ebda. Her solo exhibition as well as in other international institutions such as Kunstmuseum Thun (2020), Museum Folkwang Essen (2018), Berlinische Galerie (2017), Haus am Waldsee and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2013), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2008), Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2007), Kunsthalle Zürich (2005) and others. Streuli regularly exhibits in group shows, such as at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2019), the 19th Sidney Biennale and Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2014), Marta Herford (2010), Helmhaus, Zurich (2009), among others. The artist’s works are represented in numerous collections such as that of the Kunsthaus Aarau, Kunsthaus Zürich, Sammlung Museum Folkwang, Sammlung Berlinische Galerie, Sammlung Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Collections of the City of Zurich, Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich, UBS Art Collection, Sammlung Bank Bär, Zurich and others.
Opening: Friday, 28. April 2023, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 28. April – Saturday, 03. June 2023
To the gallery
Caption: Christine Streuli, Peeling #03, 2023, mixed media on canvas, 195 x 135 cm. Photo: Jens Liebchen; Courtesy of the artist & FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Berlin
Exhibition Falling Apart – FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
