calendario eventi  :: 

X

28/10/2010

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

Albrecht Schnider
Long Distance Perspectives

On Friday, October 29th Galerie Thomas Schulte is pleased to open Fernperspektiven, Long Distance Perspectives, an exhibition presenting an unusually large group of small format landscape paintings by Albrecht Schnider. During the opening reception from 7 to 9 pm the artist will be present.

Over the past 20 years, Albrecht Schnider has repeatedly created small format landscapes, forming an isolated group in the artist’s oeuvre, characterized by the subject of mountain and hilly scenery, panorama-like horizontal format, and the use of oil paints, in contrast to the lacquer paints he usually uses in his work.

Schnider’s landscapes emerge in his Berlin studio, not as a depiction of an actually seen landscape, but as pure artificiality, emerging in a highly controlled and precise act of painting and through a minutely planned visual construction by way of puzzle-like color fields consisting of various shades of green, yellow, and brown.

Seemingly a typologized scene, and despite the dematerialization and emptiness evoked, the images touch the beholder, recall memories and perhaps longings. "Albrecht Schnider turns the perspective around—the distant does not lie inside the painting, it takes place in a mirror, it takes place reflexively, in retroactive beholding. The beholder standing before the small format image is the point far in the distance. In the miniature web of expanding and narrowing surfaces, he imagines a broad scope of heights and surfaces—the distant here lies in his gaze, in remembering… In this moment of perception images of memory surface, something that we want to understand with the lyrical word landscape—a fleeting transparency in deep surfaces." (Birgit Szepanksi)

Albrecht Schnider develops a new landscape from the last finished, and in this way over the years smaller and larger groups have emerged. While each landscape is in itself closed and autonomous, according to the artist the series reveals very personal things, that is, his doubt and incapacity to create something absolute. "The moment of repetition has personally something to do with me too. I have the tendency to repeating episodes in my life, almost to the point of monotony. Anything that interrupts this monotony is ultimately a horror to me. To that extent, these landscape series could even be seen as self-portraits."

Albrecht Schnider (born 1958, in Lucerne, Switzerland) studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung and the University of Berne. Since 1988 he has received numerous grants and awards for his artistic practice, including Eidgenössisches Kunststipendium in 1989, 1990, and 1992; Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 1990, and the award Manor-Kunstpreis of Lucerne in 1994. In 1998 Kunsthalle Berne presented Schnider’s first solo exhibition and since then the artist has exhibited extensively including museums and institutions in Lucerne, Zurich, Solothurn, and Aarau. Schnider is currently preparing an extensive exhibition on his sculptures and drawings for the Museum Solothurn. Since 1998, Albrecht Schnider lives and works in Berlin.

-------

Stephen Willats
Street Diagram

On Friday, October 29, 2010, from 7 to 9 pm Galerie Thomas Schulte will open the exhibition "Street Diagram" by Stephen Willats, featuring a site-specific monumental wall drawing that incorporates film projections.

Stephen Willats, born in London in 1943, counts as one of the most influential contemporary English artists of his generation and has been frequently used as a reference point in the endeavors of following generations of artists. Acting as one of the few serious players in English conceptual art during the 1960’s and late 1970’s, his work has been acknowledged through numerous publications and solo exhibitions and can be found in various European museums today. Willats’ techniques range from drawing to photographic documentation, to computer operated communication devices and film.

Since the mid 1960’s Willats has been preoccupied by the notion of individual value systems and societal communication and the possibility of making them transparent by means of art. He poses the question of an individual’s personal worth in society and how the individual perceives his personal lebensraum, how he defines it, and how he makes it liveable. His work revolves around life-realities in shape of interactive and personally organized systems and their effect on the concepts of life and the identity of the people in them. How do people communicate under the constraints and limitations that inflict these specific social conditions? How do they come to agreements despite differing value systems, parameters, and life-perspectives?

Willats’ large-scale wall drawings, which have been shown in various galleries and museums in recent years, combine drawing and video projections and go back to a specific, unprecedented diagrammatic method of drawing that Willats has been developing since 1962. To Willats, his drawings become an artistic parallel-activity and a means of a concentrated yet informal expression of his concept. In his Democratic Grids, Willats depicts social models as quasi window like cut-outs from an infinitely large structure, while the drawings of his Ideological Towers series play with the abstractions of architecture and modern paraphernalia as symbols of societal ambiance and individual self-identification. Both systems come together in his Wall Drawings as seen in Cybernetic Still Life No. 6 specifically conceived for Berlin and the gallery’s Corner Space.

Important solo exhibitions include the current exhibition Counterconsciousness at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, that concentrates on works on the post-punk, night life and wasteland scene of the 1980’s, Assumptions and Presumptions, Art on the Underground, London (2007), Stephen Willats Multiple Clothing: Message-Interaction-Exchange (1965-1998), Tate Modern, London (2006), How the world is and how it could be, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2006), Live in your Head, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000), Buildings and People, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (1993), Living within Contained Relationships, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1978), and Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1980). Willats has also been part of numerous group exhibitions, involving San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2007), FRAC Rhones-Alpes (1997) and FRAC Haute-Normandie (1996), as well as Biennales in Berlin, Paris, and Venice (1979, 1982, 2004). Willats lives and works in London and is the founder and editor of Control Magazine since 1962. From 1972 to 1973, he was director of the Centre of Behavioural Art, Gallery House in London, and from 1979 to 1980, he was the DAAD fellow artist in Berlin.

Image: Albrecht Schnider, Landschaft, 2010

Opening Friday, 29 October 7 to 9 pm

Galerie Thomas Schulte
Charlottenstraße 24 D-10117 Berlin
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 12 to 6 p.m.
and by appointment

stampa

permanent link