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until 07.01. | #0826ARTatBerlin | Galerie Kornfeld shows from 12th November 2016 the exhibition “Weight of Glass” by the artist Jan Tichy.
Weight of Glass is the first solo exhibition of Chicago based artist Jan Tichy with Galerie Kornfeld in Berlin and will open concurrently with a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabruck. The two exhibitions will both feature a new real-time neon work entitled German Nature, 2016 that uses light as a way of registering the new languages introduced to the German landscape with the arrival of over one million refugees. Kunsthalle Osnabruck will publish an accompanying catalog with texts by Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaesbohrer and Dr. Robin Schuldenfrei.
Subsequent to his work on the design of the Moholy-Nagy exhibition, Education of Senses at the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago in 2012, Tichy was given access by the Moholy-Nagy estate to four original pieces of a film footage that László Moholy-Nagy made in London 1936. Moholy-Nagy, one of the Bauhaus Masters, stayed briefly in London on his way to Chicago, after having been forced to flee Germany. The eighty seconds of the abstract black-and-white footage comes from a commission by H.G. Wells for his visionary film Things To Come. Only a small number of Moholy-Nagy’s shots of abstract, glass urban visions made it into the movie sequence “rebuilding of Everytown” that portrays the new utopian future for the devastated world. The artist was not credited. Working through Moholy’s techniques of reproduction, multiplication, flipping and layering, Tichy worked with the found footage of eighty seconds, rebuilding it into a panoramic three-channel format of five and a half minutes duration; a new urban landscape owned by both artists.
Galerie Kornfeld, which is premiering Things To Come 1936-2012 in Germany, invited Tichy to challenge his Chicago-based interpretation of Moholy-Nagy from the Berlin perspective. The artist spent three months in Germany in winter and summer of 2016, researching the Bauhaus periods of Dessau and Berlin as well as responding to the current social and political situation, eventually interconnecting the two.
Installation no. 30 (Lucia), 2016 and single channel video Negatives Missing, 2016 follow the new research published by Robin Schuldenfrei on the fate of the photographs created by Lucia Moholy, the first wife of László Moholy-Nagy, who single-handedly documented the Bauhaus beginnings and development but had to abandon all of her glass plates negatives in Berlin when fleeing the Nazis in 1933. The weight of that glass is freighted today with the weight of life’s possessions that people are forced to leave behind. The 330 glass-plates negatives that never made it back to Lucia Moholy still retain their imagistic potential when activated with light. Installation no. 30 (Lucia) is a single channel video projection on 330 glass plates that modulates the architectural space of the gallery with reflections similar to the ones created for Things To Come, an architectural space of Everytown, with a promise of a photograph of architecture.
The exhibition features two photographs taken by the artist during his first and last visit to Berlin (1989 and 2016) and two photograms that invite us back to the darkroom under the Master House in Dessau. 100RAW, 2008 is a single channel video on a monitor that was created as a direct response to Production: Reproduction an important text formulated by the Moholys in 1922, possibly in that very darkroom. The video presents the first one hundred photographs captured by the artist in Chicago in digital RAW format that were than opened and processed in both visual and audio softwares.
Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography. His conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Assistant Professor at the Department of Photography and the Department of Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and CCA Tel Aviv among others. In 2011, he created Project Cabrini Green (2011), a community-based art project that illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building at the Cabrini Green Housing Projects in Chicago during its month long demolition. In 2014 Tichy started to work on a long-term, NEA supported, community project in Gary, IN – the Heat Light Water Project. His works are in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Israel Museum Jerusalem; Magasin Stockholm Kunsthall and Indianapolis Museum Art among others. Recently his video Things To Come (1936–2012) was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of the program Films To Come: Moholy-Nagy and the Moving Image.
Vernissage: Saturday, 12th November 2016, 6-9 p.m
Exhibition period: Saturday, 12th November 2016 – Wednesday, 07th January 2017
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Bildunterschrift: Installation no. 30 (Lucia), 2016, Einkanalvideoprojektion auf 330 Glasplatten, Maße variabel
Exhibition Jan Tichy – Galerie Kornfeld – Kunst in Berlin Art at Berlin
