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until 20.06. | #3006ARTatBerlin | EFREMIDIS GALLERY shows from 1st May 2021 the solo show Butcher Block with works by the artist Mathis Altmann and in parallel two works by Lisa Jo in the [erp].
In his new exhibition Butcher Block, Mathis Altmann (*1987, Munich) witnesses the millennial moment and its ongoing collapse between work and leisure. In the grip of a burgeoning meritocracy, his generation’s drive to improve peaks in a perpetual need for self-glorification.
But improvement is a fraught idea. Though often used in optimistic narratives about technological innovation, the word originally stems from making something ‘more profitable.’ Is there progress in the obsession with advancement? And who can really tell the difference?
Both satirical and introspective, Butcher Block shakes up the co-dependency of contemporary narratives like community, labor, technology and capital. Typically over the top, the artist points toward the agency and complicity of his own generation.
Mathis Altmann, wewontwork, 2020, Courtesy of the artist and Fitzpatrick Gallery
In his new series of LED wall sculptures and illuminated signs, he morphs punk kitsch nostalgia with tech glamour fetishes. Corporeal bodies fragment into pixelation and digitized abstraction. In defense of non-compliance, the artist creates absurd aberrations of the branding strategies of a global co-working company. Defiance is an old dance, showcasing disintegration as some kind of progress. In this Ballardian slapstick comedy, success and failure are superimposed.
Mathis Altmann currently lives and works in Berlin and Zurich. In 2011, he received a BA from the Zurich University of the Arts, where he has taught since 2016. His work has been shown at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2021); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2021); The Luma Foundation, Zurich (2020); Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier (2019); Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2018), MAAT, Lisbon (2017); Swiss Institute, New York (2016); Palais de Tokyo (2016); and Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2015). He has been awarded the Manor Art Prize (2021), the Prix Mobilière (2016), the Swiss Art Award (2015), and the ZBK Art Award (2013).
At the [erp]: Lisa Jo
Lisa Jo (*1983, Los Angeles USA) presents two new paintings. For the most part, Lisa Jo’s work eschews figurative representation and yet recognizable body parts emerge—not bodies without organs, but organs without bodies. Like the process of digitization, what was whole is disassembled, detached, into pieces of disparate information.
Both works are presented on metal stands—a similar construction to the one in Philip Johnson’s Glass House: a see-through home, not so different from a storefront window. Blurring and fetishizing the domestic and its interior space, putting everything on display. Switching off the distinctions.
Lisa Jo, Shadowbanned, 2020 (detail)
In her flat and corporeal shapes, Lisa Jo joins together disparate bits into 2021 chimeras. She makes Modernism’s obsession with transparency brutally personal and asks bluntly: is the body a better glass house? What are boundaries—physically, erotically, digitally—of personhood today?
Exhibition period: Saturday 1 May – Saturday, 12th June 2021 – ATTENTION: extended until Sunday, 20. June 2021 (until Gallery Weekend Summer Special)
To the Gallery
Exhibition Mathis Altmann + Lisa Jo – EFREMIDIS GALLERY | Contemporary Art – Kunst in Berlin – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
