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until 04.11. | #4016ARTatBerlin | ZWINGER Galerie shows from 9. September 2023 (Opening: 08.09.) the exhibition of the artist Gunter Reski.
Some images, or better components of them, just barely miss current events. That results from solidified helplessness, which is fed by constant overstrain. It doesn’t really have to be, but it’s lying around everywhere to jump down your and my necks as if automated. It’s a question of who or what gets damaged and scratched in the process. The subjects certainly don’t. The content often doesn’t even know it’s a topic. All it takes is for a word like weather to appear in the picture, a hand stuck in the street, or a press photo of one of the first artificially created stem cells. These are pictorial moments that scroll away on their own, but are captured here with an analog make.
Some images are reminiscent of pages in a photo album. Panini or photo albums are defined by a multitude of images or the exclusion of the one weighty single image. Now just sticking the photo of that semi-sympathetic uncle exclusively on a single page? Better not. Show up next to other relatives he can already. Here the four, five pictorialities in the tableau pictures are marked by different kinds of making.
Maybe the pictures sleep next to each other. Some vegetate also rather, perhaps uneasily because of the one adjoining. It is an influenced coexistence that involuntarily sets in motion associations and moments of comparison, in search of connections or deeper commonalities that do not exist.
Repertoire painting, which sends its diverse painting methods, styles and materialities in parallel slalom to the show run. Informal swarms of suggestively floating brushstrokes. Driving Realomalerei with figures and protagonists, as a counterpart, these are in situations that take place outside the picture. Glazing or lardy brushstrokes, for example, like nerve tracts or confused plant stems. Often brushes or painters at work on and in the picture itself. Occasional academic body studies. Airbrush photograms with 20s scanner appearance …
Micro-expressions demand micro-skills. Forensics can not wait. An interest in something like style contrasts, which do well or skillfully annoy each other side by side and against each other in a picture, plays a role. Certain hand movements in certain workplaces. The whether to guest at the how in as different a costume as possible. In the past, a certain painting style seemed to be a historical necessity. Entire curricula vitae were gladly dictated by it. A presumed, leased I as another earlier, newly late. In which style can be slipped convincingly still or which style drives me in before itself.
By a verkästelte placement of the different picture parts, everything like neatly parked, it could also still grow fences, the possible mess keeps within limits. Does the egalitarian placement enable meaning-washing? It’s a far cry from visual cacophony. Some people can watch four Netflix series at the same time. Otherwise, split screen is old hat running out of heads.
Yes, good old postmodernism. Old for sure, but was it good and for what again? Whoever still can’t enjoy too much arbitrariness, indifference, any amount of determinationless simultaneity, knows that might have started here. At least for a medium-term short-term memory. Without postmodernism I would not have painted. Gratitude lapsed by the statute of limitations boiled up again. Is postmodernism possible again in a different way without irony, even if one thought that this was actually one of its lifebloods? And if distance has worked as an artistic ticket for an ideology-free artistic access, how has the tool “distance” changed due to the seriously altered social parameters of the last decades? The original postmodernism, through joyfully indiscriminate anything-goes to the point of eclecticism, was also a first productive way of dealing with the emerging image and information rush. Art as a training camp for overtaxing skills, from earlier cheerful image redundancy now to consuming image stress.
Gunter Reski, 2023
Opening: Friday, 8. September 2023, 6pm to 9pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 9. September– Saturday, 04. November 2023
Special opening hours Berlin ART Week: Friday, 15. September 12 – 21 Uhr
Finissage: Saturday, 4. November 2023, 5:00 – 7:00 Uhr, with Apéro
To the Gallery
Image title: Gunter Reski, o.T., 2023, Acryl auf Baumwolle, 170×40 cm
Exhibition Gunter Reski– ZWINGER Galerie | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
