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until 10.04. | #2994ARTatBerlin | Semjon Contemporary presents from 19th March 2021 the group show gold fever.
Works by Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Renate Hampke, Ute Essig, Nataly Hocke, Henrik U. Müller, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Karina Spechter and Bettina Weiß are being presented. Special guest: Uli Aigner, ONE MILLION.
For a year now, we have been living in an exceptional situation that we could not even have imagined as a nightmare just a short time before. Corona determines our everyday life!
The warnings of coming worldwide epidemics and their effects on our lives, on the other hand, have actually been known for decades. Only a few took them seriously. Now we are in the midst of it and hope to have escaped the painful misery soon thanks to the vaccine that was tailor-made in no time at all. We are again in good spirits in the frustration of the new daily routine.
Our socio-cultural life has been completely turned upside down: physical lack of contact with family, friends and acquaintances dominates everyday life, and we have been deprived of the natural way of being part of a group (no matter how big it was) and participating in concerts, plays and exhibitions in museums and galleries. The longing for art and culture, on the other hand, is growing.
So it comes as a great surprise when the next group exhibition is entitled gold fever in view of the imminent loosening of political restrictions.
Karina Spechter, Glück, 2001, 59 x 63 x 60 cm, PVC-Folie / PVC film
The exhibition can stand as a symbol for curiosity about the new, for departure, but it can also imply security and wealth: Wealth is in the sense of the diversity of art and culture encounters all the time, but also the wealth for what we have just realised in the last year – art and culture are our self-defining fabric and the projection surface, but also the spiritual staple for our humanity. There is no private event, no private togetherness, in which culture is not an essential component!
It is shameful that German politics has lumped culture and leisure together. Isn’t it said, or at least it wasn’t once said: The Germans, the people of thinkers and poets? How low has the world of culture sunk in the perception of the political nomenklatura, how far removed from it to find itself reduced almost trashily to the concept of leisure? Germany is a run-down adventure park in fun trousers, one might think. Recently, people are coming to their senses and at least using the term culture again.
Thanks to the numerous rebels!
Art lures and expands our minds. It becomes gold fever, a gold rush.
But we also know that all that glitters is not gold. Dazzle can also be a strategy of art. Not every artist can use the precious material as a raw material. The petrochemical industry steps in. The illusion of gold pretends its value, but uses the metaphor of wealth and power formed over millennia, and transcends the divine and the vastness of its – or God’s – spiritual universe. Art has replaced religion. In its diversity – whether painting and sculpture, theatre and opera, pop music, performance, new music or dance – it creates the spiritual space, the resonance space for the search for ourselves. It helps us to understand who we are. The forced break of one year now has certainly brought us closer to ourselves.
In times of crisis, there is – who would be surprised – a flight into gold in the economy.
Not without reason!
Uli Aigner, ONE MILLION (Detail / detail), Porzellan, 12 Karat Gold / porcelain, 12 karat gold
If, in addition to the gallery artists, Uli Aigner has been invited as a special guest with an excerpt of her life’s work ONE MILLION, this has another reason besides the seductive 12-carat gold setting of the inner walls of her white porcelain vessels: the aspiration and reality of her work can wonderfully transcend what has long since become reality. The simultaneity of everything in this so large world, which is, however, a vanishingly small fraction of the universe. Corona has now made it clear to us at the latest that we are all interwoven with everything. The virus, invisible to us, has taken the world hostage in an instant. Globalism has its opportunities, but also its price. Incidentally, gold could be used to set limits to the virus. Gold is antiseptic.
Semjon H. N. Semjon im März 2021
The exhibition can be visited by appointment on 030-7841291. Those already at the door will be admitted without fuss if there is no rush. However, to break chains of infection, the gallery is obliged to leave the name, email address and telephone number.
Vernissage: Due to the current Covid 19 situation the opening is cancelled
Exhibition dates: Friday, 19 March to Saturday, 10 April 2021
To the Gallery
Exhibition gold fever – Semjon Contemporary | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin
