Chris Dennis Art: installation

Jose Dávila

KÖNIG GALERIE | CHAPEL | 20.1.–25.2.2018

Jose Dávila

Press Release: Jose Dávila works in a variety of media, including painting, prints,collage, and sculpture. His conceptual preoccupations originate in the potential of materials in dialogue with the space.Through appropriation, reinterpretation, and other discursive re-enactments, Dávila’s work offers a fertile ground to reflect on the ways that art history movements are digested in peripheral cultures, questioning cycles of dissemination and utilizing the political potential of materials and images to address forms of consumption.

For his second solo exhibition NEWTON’S FAULT at KÖNIG GALERIE in Berlin, Dávila has created a site-specific installation titled that reacts directly to the space.This strategy has recently been used by the artist as away of incorporating the particularities of a space into the dynamics of sculpture.

Two stones in its raw form stabilize the game of weights between the beams.Volcanoes, geothermal energy and the movement of tectonic plates are the primeval sculptors of the rock that anchors Dávila’s sculpture – while the beams that support it are a man-made creation. The dichotomy is also visible in the platonic precise forms of the beams contrasting the organic natural form at the top.

The apple is symbolically placed into the sculptural installation - it has a physical meaning in the sense of Newton’s law of gravitation, while simultaneously utilizing a mythological and religious vocabulary.

The linked sequence of actions and reactions is temporally paused when all the forces are in complete balance. As in his Joint Effort works,the fragments and materials of the sculpture seem to work together as a conscious exertion for a specific common purpose.

The artist emphasizes diametrically opposed qualities of materials. While conveying together Dávila’s interests in architecture, minimalism and the history of art, the sculptures in this project capture a moment of suspension and an ominous tranquility, suitable to the politics of balance.The apparent stillness of the sculptures is the result of the correspondence between forces, the support and the natural tendency of things to fall to earth.

Jose Dávila was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1974. He studied architecture in the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente in Guadalajara, Mexico, however, he considers himself a self-taught artist,with an intuitive formation.

His work is part of the Getty’s PST LA/LA triennial in Los Angeles and has been exhibited in Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE; Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, USA, Savannah College of Art and Design; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; Museum Voorlinden, AG Wassenaar, Nederland, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo MUAC, Mexico City; Caixa Forum, Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; Kunstwerke, Berlin; San Diego Museum of Art; Museo de Arte Reina Sofia,Madrid; MAK, Vienna, Fundación/ Colección JUMEX, Mexico City; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Museu do Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo; The Moore Space, Miami; NICC,Antwerp, among others; and has been featured in international publications such as Cream 3, ed. Phaidon, 100 Latin-American Artists, ed. Exit and The Feather and The Elephant, ed. Hatje Cantz. Jose Dávila has been awarded with the Baltic Artists’Award in 2017.

Corinne Wasmuht

KÖNIG GALERIE | NAVE | 20.1.–25.2.2018

Corinne Wasmuht

Corinne Wasmuht (detail)

Corinne Wasmuht

Corinne Wasmuht (detail)

Corinne Wasmuht

Press Release: KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present new works by Corinne Wasmuht in the main hall of the gallery (St. Agnes I Nave). Conceived especially for the exhibition, the architecture refers to a space of transit, which is a main topic within the artist’s ouevre. Here, a total of six works are on show, all of which were finished during the last year.

Corinne Wasmuht’s complex, multifaceted pictorial worlds develop through a gradual, painstaking process of painting which in a certain sense already begins with her sitting at the computer. Wasmuht selects single motifs and elements from a large collection of photographs that she has taken and combines them in different ways until she finds the basis for her new motif. Once the artist has actually started to paint and has transferred the elements onto the wooden or aluminium surface one by one, the image is freed from its digital template and continues to develop through the dynamic nature of its origin.

Despite their complexity and overwhelming, puzzle-like juxtaposition and superposition of different, often very small forms, the works radiate a deep sense of calm, acting as silent invitations to contemplation. They feature urban, often futuristic scenes reminiscent of airport terminals,pedestrian zones and museum halls, yet they are fragmented and overlapping,they appear both sparse and dense. Architectural structures collide with schematic representations of vegetation and human figures, large monochrome planes are superimposed with detailed, crystalline structures that cover large sections of the image like abstract gaps that nevertheless take up space, recalling digital aesthetics.

In addition to fragmentation and restructuring, repetition is another important element in Corinne Wasmuht’s artistic strategy. Single motifs sometimes resurface in a number of works, often several years apart. The work entitled U1 on show in the exhibition, for instance, features an exact excerpt from Uqbar 1 from 2011. By focusing on a specific section of the image, the artist develops a new narrative in the current piece that mines the structure and dynamic nature of the differently rendered details.

The structuring use of spatial perspective and alignment have a strong impact on the compositions, inexorably sucking the viewer into the image.The images seem readable, as well as pixellated, and the human brain immediately tries to translate the dense yet also clearly delineated forms into a real spatial situation or to identify what is being portrayed. The impossibility of understanding what is happening in the image at first glance further intensifies the process of contemplating it. Like a large panoramic painting, Wasmuht’s works open up an inexhaustible cosmos of different pictorial elements that relate to one another, but that also dominate the pictorial space in and of themselves.

Born in 1964 in Dortmund, Corinne Wasmuht lives and works in Berlin and Karlsruhe. She studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has been a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe since 2006. Her work has been awarded numerous prizes and can be seen in solo and group shows, for example at the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy; Albright-Knox-Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main,Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; and Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany.

Press Release:
Blain|Southern presents shadow of curls, Sislej Xhafa’s first exhibition in Berlin.
At the core of Xhafa’s practice are the identity politics that surround the legal status of his country of origin, Kosovo, as well as broader ideas of power, politics, immigration and social and economic mobility. Many of these themes are explored in his pavilion this year at the 57th Venice Biennale, representing the Republic of Kosovo.
In shadow of curls, Xhafa works with a variety of materials associated with different types of migration, as well as a range of quotidian objects that have been re-appropriated, altered or rendered useless. Employing a conceptual mode, he draws upon the history of the readymade to ironic, humorous and subversive effect.

At first glance, an olive tree next to the entrance looks out of place amid artworks. Yet attached to it’s trunk, a tag reads ‘dont touch me’, drawing on ideas of ownership and privacy, while alluding to the history of the olive tree as a symbol of peace, or the tree as witness to history.
In the corner of the space sits a large checked plastic bag, an object so common that it is almost synonymous with human movement. The open bag partially reveals a crystal chandelier, hinting at the hope of a new life, or perhaps a sense of suffocation.
Hanging alongside one another, slightly away from the wall, are large canvases painted uniformly white and each partially covered in clear polythene. Closer inspection reveals barbed wire on the wall, a menacing barrier to another space mostly concealed by the pristine paintings. For Xhafa, the clean, perfect surface masks a darker, grim reality.
In contrast, a monochromatic black painting hangs opposite. The matt surface subtly broken by the word ‘Chicago’ painted in black gloss onto the canvas, which has been tipped on its side. This almost illegible reference is an example of the visual poetry common in Xhafa’s work. Avoiding direct metaphor, the work references multi-layered definitions of violence.
Xhafa’s readymades are household objects, a garden hose, a refrigerator, garbage bags, mattress and a sun shade; his use of concrete has equally domestic connotations of home building, permanence and belonging, yet paradoxically of entrapment and brutal economics.
shadow of curls creates a space where familiar objects are transformed into charged, ambiguous artworks, inviting visitors to participate in conversations about specific moments in history or current affairs, or universal questions about human freedom.