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16/11/2010

Sasha Auerbakh / Monika Brandmeier

Matthew Bown Galerie, Berlin

Sasha Auerbakh

Matthew Bown Galerie is proud to present a show by the young Russian artist Sasha Auerbakh. The exhibition runs from 18 November to 18 December.

Manual is a three-channel video based on bomb-making instructions found in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, a notorious publication of the counter-culture age (it was published in 1971), easily found and downloaded on the internet. The three videos present the ‘recipe’ for making a bomb in contemporary terms, as a cooking show on TV presents the recipe of a meal to be eaten. The translation of bomb-recipe from the public realm to the gallery context updates Duchamp’s Readymades. Just as an urinal selected and exhibited by Duchamp ceased to be a functional object and became instead the object of aesthetic contemplation, so the bomb recipe ceases to be a practical instruction and becomes instead a work of art whose meaning, like that of Duchamp’s urinal, is non-specific and open to interpretation. At the moment the bomb is absent, it is merely a theoretical product to be derived from the video work, but the collector who purchases the artwork may, for additional payment to cover expenses, have a bomb made by the artist. In the context of a collection of contemporary art, the physical object – the bomb - will function not as an instrument of destruction but as an example of a possible response to the work.

The physical, phenomenological experience of an artwork – or of any object – is only a small part of its existence. After viewing, or even before or without viewing, it lives in the consciousness. This allows for the existence in the imagination of artworks and objects which have been lost or destroyed, or which have not yet been created, and for these to be in essential respects equivalent to really existing things. Objects Of Art is comprised of three white-painted plywood cubes, each 1 metre x 1 metre x 1 metre. At first sight they look like a constellation of minimalist sculptures. A closer inspection reveals unpainted rectangular patches of plywood on the top of the cubes, which are thus transformed from artworks into plinths or pedestals from which artworks which we can only imagine have been removed. What we first thought was ‘art’ becomes a merely technical object and the ‘art’ it references exists only in the imagination.

Auerbakh was born in 1985. She works in Moscow and Vienna. She has shown widely in Moscow. Her work may be seen concurrently at Modernikon, curated by Francesco Bonami and Irene Calderoni at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy. This is her first solo show and her first show in Germany.

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Monika Brandmeier

Matthew Bown Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of work by Monika Brandmeier. Brandmeier works in sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and video. At Matthew Bown Gallery she presents four works which offer a sensuous, multi-layered exploration of the formal elements of sculpture – space, thingness, gravity and perception.

Swing For Hanging The Ladder is an installation that consists of the silhouette on a wall of a ladder, in front of which hangs a single long bar suspended from two cords like a swing. The image of the ladder is distorted by the effect of perspective, so that the steps are not horizontal but set at an angle. The hanging bar of the swing, on the other hand, asserts a perfect horizontal. It is something like a horizon line. Thus the work explores the gap between what we know (about ladders, say), and what we perceive: the relationship between ideal platonic form or idea and its perceptual reality. The hanging bar (the “swing”) not only establishes the concept of horizontality, it also seems to reference multiple possibilities: childrenʼs play; one of the cross-hairs on a gunsight, perhaps; and the possibility that it might at any moment be put into motion. Such readings emphasise not only potential instability but also a dialogue between the formal language of sculpture and the accidents of real life.

Level is a framed photograph of five builders' spirit-levels, arranged on adjacent surfaces. An examination of the air-bubbles in the levels makes it clear that they were all in fact lying horizontally when they were photographed. In the twodimensional plane of the photograph itself, only one is literally horizontal, the rest are set at angles that articulate their relative positions in space. The work is a meditation on the difference between what we know and what we see, between spatial reality and its two-dimensional representation.

Instinct is a frankly sensual work: a flat, red-painted shape is attached to the wall by a length of thick bronze wire. The red-painted shape has an arbitrary silhouette, like the negative space between objects; yet it is perfectly balanced and its base sits on a horizontally just above the floor. The bronze wire is an ambiguous gesture: it is an exploration of the space of the room, like an arm extended tentatively, yet it also penetrates the wall and forms the firm support from which the much more substantial red shape hangs. Both red shape and copper wire could reference the human body. This is emphasised by the hang of the work, which we meet not at eye-level but as it were with our body, and whose apparent dynamism yet gives rise to stability.

Monika Brandmeier has shown widely in Germany and abroad. She is professor of sculpture at the HfBK, Dresden. Her work is in the collections of the State Museums Berlin, the Kupferstichkabinett, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Düsseldorf Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, and also in the Daimler Art Collection, Stuutgart. She had a recent solo show at Galerie Polaris, Paris, and her work may also be seen currently in the exhibition Knapp shining at Stedefreund, Berlin.

Image: Sasha Auerbakh, Still from Manual, 2009
3-channel video installation, looped

Reception for the artist: Wednesday 17 November, 18.00-20.30

Matthew Bown Galerie
Keithstrasse 10 - Berlin
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12-18
admision free

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