Monday, October 17, 2016

Moritz Schleime. Jarmuschek and Partner. Berlin


MORITZ SCHLEIME - THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
Opening reception: Friday, September 16, 2016, 6 pm
September 17–October 15, 2016 
Press release: Moritz Schleime paints our world as a universe of antagonisms, in which loud and noisy tones are always close to subtle emotions and tender feelings of joy. In his pictures, inflammatory and explosive power, social criticism and dreamlike absurdities can be found as well as romance, hope, ecstatic conditions, self-destructive aggression and abyssal disillusions – often combined with a large amount of black humour.
The artist presents his latest works under the title „The Virgin Suicides“. Ignorance, unfeelingness, tristesse and a lack of perspective mean not only the downfall for the protagonists in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name, but have always been those abysses, in which the figures of Moritz Schleime’s paintings are gazing into. Right there the vulnerability of our social fabric is to be found: in the lack of mutual responsibility and understanding.Thus, the personification of search for meaning and suppression seems to be lying on a car roof and to sober up in an idyllic setting of expressive colour. „Hangover, best friend“. How noisy can an empty beach be? Rebellion, exuberance and anti-culture have not left Moritz Schleime’s characters so far, but now they are joined by those with ties, pipes and hats. Conventionality, ladylikeness and business chic are confronting the beholder as well as Hollywood appearances and countryside idylls, leading him into a mask-like, shimmering world of adulthood, midway through glamorous individuality, feelings of safety, dropouts, forsakenness and melancholic loneliness.Thereby, sophisticated living rooms with designer furniture, romantic encounters on a forest glade and mysterious portraits remain always ambivalent and let our thoughts run free. Oscillating between civilisation and wildness, fragility and roughness, vitality and morbidity, it’s left to the onlooker to state his position on the perceived - along with his world view.
Moritz Schleime uses the pictorial language of different styles of art history and creates an own one out of them, that combines equally Surrealism, Expressionism, Dada and Realism. Close to the present age, he already gives us an idea of how the ambivalent sentiment of our era will be classified in the future: A chronicler of the chronically unstable.
detail
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Jarmuschek + Partner

Joachim Bandau. Galerie Thomas Fischer. Berlin.

 

Joachim Bandau - Drawings and Wall Objects 17.09. - 03.12.2016

In terms of their form, Joachim Bandau’s bunker drawings are both surprising and fascinating. Conceived as a „survival machine“, as both foxhole and firing range, the bunker in Bandau’s drawings is more than a prototype of instrumental architecture. It appears as a contradictory hybrid, archaic and yet modern. In reality a kind of fortification, Bandau’s bunkers are like sculptures with strange anthropomorphic features.

 
 
 
 
Galerie Thomas Fischer

Achraf Touloub: CONT'D. Galeria PLAN B. Berlin 2016.


For those two circles
Where perceptions are mise en scène
Beginnings look like encore
One on the other, transparent and thin as layers
Real as one again/
Grey horizon for confused bro’
Drawing waves between eyes and mouth
Extended feelings emerge following
The cycle shadow leaves while responding
Cause God loves ironie
Les without ending dimensions
On the stage of your eyes
And as expected you show back/
Since the smell of variant scenarios
Genes proudly reappearing
By stunned links as those long and short chains
Then all visions count equally/
Now one is cropping the other
Making possibles greater
If you eat your tongue only
So by the european nights
Mixed moods are cutting the road
And a straight-line becomes fractal/
The new stuff for the news
Like rectangles making squares
Maybe for fifteen minutes or fifteen years
The tattooed faces will seem in advance
This is continued and so on
Press Release:
Galeria Plan B is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Achraf Touloub, to open on Friday, the 16th of September 2016, in the framework of the Berlin Art Week. For CONT'D, the second solo exhibition with Plan B, Achraf Touloub (b. 1986 in Casablanca, lives and works in Paris) develops a show as a sensorial experience, in which various layers of ourreality merge into a loop.His drawings, sculptures and video works are based on the intuition that the conventional binary opposition between tradition and the modern mind is, in fact, amovement of convergence. September 16 – October 29, 2016.
Galeria PLAN B

Dieter Meier. Galerie Judin. Berlin.

Dieter Meier:  Possible Beings 1973 – 201617                                                                        Galerie Judin                                                                                                            September – 29 October 2016






Press release: Galerie Judin is pleased to pre­sent its first collab­o­ra­tion with leg­endary artist, musi­cian (“Yello”), writer and cosmopoli­tan Dieter Meier. The exhi­bi­tion Pos­si­ble Beings 1973—2016 brings together works that span more than 40 years of his artis­tic career. The exhi­bi­tion is accompa­nied by a lim­ited edi­tion, a two-vol­ume pub­lica­tion.
Meier launched him­self as a con­ceptual artist in 1968 with actions pre­sented in pub­lic spaces. In 1970, his short movie 1 Minute interrupted the reg­u­lar programming of Swiss pub­lic tele­vi­sion: for one minute, the artist’s motion­less head appeared—accompa­nied only by the offi­cial time signal. Report­edly, the audi­ence was deeply dis­turbed. Con­ceptual pie­ces such as this conveyed Meier’s sub­tle and humor­ous exam­ina­tion of the ephemeral nature of film and the volatil­ity of human exis­tence.
Around the same time, Meier turned to con­ceptual photog­ra­phy. In 1972, snapshots and other doc­u­ments of an indi­vid­ual by the name of Thomas Mat­tes emerged. This marked the be­gin­ning of Meier’s ongo­ing pre­occupa­tion with ready-made per­sonas, who unsurpris­ingly bear a striking resem­blance to the artist him­self.
The most comprehen­sive se­ries to der­ive from this practice is Per­son­al­i­ties, made between 1973 and 1974. Relying solely upon var­i­a­tions in his facial expres­sions, hairstyles, pos­tures, and cloth­ing, Meier had him­self photographed as 48 differ­ent per­son­al­i­ties. Despite the fact that his vis­age always peeks through the dozens of incar­na­tions, the sheer number of them eventu­ally wipes away any embrace of him as a unique indi­vid­ual. Instead, the per­son­al­i­ties, over time, have devel­oped a life of their own. In the se­ries As Time Goes By (2005) and Pos­si­ble Beings (2016), Meier returned to the orig­inal Per­son­al­i­ties and pro­vided a selec­tion of them with updated appear­ances and biogra­phies. In the years to come, he plans to call upon the remain­ing char­ac­ters to explore their pos­si­ble life sto­ries.
Recent museum ret­ro­spec­tives of Meier’s con­ceptual art have been pre­sented by the Water­mill Center on Long Island, in New York, the Deichtorhallen/Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg, and the Aargauer Kun­sthaus in Aarau.

 Galerie Judin

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Chiharu Shiota. Blaine Southern - Berlin.

Chiharu Shiota. Uncertain Journey. Blaine Southern. Berlin, October 2016.

It is quite clear the last thing the internet needs is more snapshots of the center piece in Chiharu Shiota's first exhibition at Blaine Southern (especially with my crappy, in desperate need of an up-date camera).

But well, here they are anyway.....
Chiharu Shiota - Uncertain Journey from above.
Chiharu Shiota - Uncertain Journey from above.
Press Release:

Chiharu Shiota | UNCERTAIN JOURNEY


For her first exhibition with Blain|Southern, Chiharu Shiota has created a new site-specific monumental installation in the Berlin gallery, eight years after she last exhibited in her home city. Shiota is primarily known for her immersive installations, such as The Key in the Hand, with which she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Weaving intricate networks of yarn, the artist creates new visual planes as if she were painting in mid-air.
Uncertain Journey centres around one installation that dominates the gallery’s vast central atrium. Seemingly growing from above, a dense web of red yarn reaches down towards the skeletal hulls of boats which rest on the gallery floor below. Speaking of the ideas she wanted to express with the boats Shiota says, ‘Our lives are like a journey without a destination, even though we don’t know where we are heading, we cannot stop. I wanted to emphasise this feeling of travelling with nowhere to go whilst alluding to a search for a sense of belonging.’
The colour of blood, the nexus of yarn is laden with symbolism, for the artist it echoes the interior of the body and the complex network of neural connections in the brain. The interwoven strands also express the connections between people, ‘the lines of yarn speak for me about everything that connects people, about changing human relationships…the installation is like one vast network, with the boats carrying us through on a journey of uncertainty and wonder.’

Gallery Bastian - Berlin. October 2016.

Anselm Kiefer. Am Anfang. 2003.
Anselm Kiefer. Am Anfang (detail).
Anselm Kiefer. Reise ans Ende der Nacht. 2004
Anselm Kiefer. Reise ans Ende der Nacht (detail). 2004

Anselm Kiefer. Am Anfang. 2003
 
 Picasso at Madoura.


Gallery Bastian.