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4/7/2013

John Chamberlain, Ida Ekblad and Christine Streuli

Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern

Curated by Fanni Fetzer

With ‘Revolution’, Kunstmuseum Luzern is taking up the theme of this year’s Lucerne Festival and reflecting on this powerful concept within the visual arts. The exhibition does not try to illustrate the concept, but rather to engage atmospherically with the phenomenon, which im- plies collision, implosion and upheaval. The works of the American artist John Chamberlain (1927-2011) are juxtaposed with pieces by two younger artists: the large-scale paintings of the Swiss painter Christine Streuli (b. 1975) and the lavish gestures in both painting and sculpture of the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad (b. 1980). The starting-point for the group exhibition, or rather for the three loosely combined solo exhibitions, was the observation that the three artists share a common sensibility and their interest in power, energy and intensity. They are quite plainly kindred spirits, in that all three artists, Chamberlain, Streuli and Ekblad essentially stretch, and overstretch, the intellect and the senses.

The treatment of paint and materials by all three artists is raw, direct, immediate and unprettified. There is something fundamentally violent about the works, which emanate a great and excessive power. This art is not necessarily beautiful, but it is magnificent! It moves and enthrals, it disturbs, oppresses and delights at the same time. The works on show exert a fascination, but they also make great demands; the lay- ers, the rough traces, the haptic quality of the works all remain enigmatic and unintelligible. The overwhelming nature of these works, in the sense that not everything can be understood down to the tiniest detail, is part of their quality. This art is revolutionary in that the process of intensification and excessive demand begins over and over again. Revolution in art is continu- ous, eternal and permanent. Compression, explosion, pace and a lack of moderation are central to this.

John Chamberlain is best known for his sculptures made of crushed car parts and oil cans. One would expect to see the classicist Chamberlain in an art-historical exhibition shown together with Minimal Art or assemblage artists. But the combination with Streuli and Ekblad shows him in a new, refreshing and perhaps even quite a revolutionary light. As the first artist to have turned scrap metal from cars into sculptures, Chamberlain caught the nerve of the age of the car and performed a critique of the world of consumerism and commodities. With a soldering iron and a generous deployment of paint, the structures he produced, often several metres high, were not industrially manufactured but hand-made and, in spite of the recalcitrant material, recall flowers, bodies or trees. For ‘Revolution’, Kunstmuseum Luzern has been able to acquire high-level loans of works by Chamberlain from different European collections, which reflect the American’s oeuvre over the decades wonderfully well. The works include a selection from a famous series of crushed oil cans, which Chamberlain calls ‘Sockets’ when they consist of indi- vidual cans, or ‘Kisses’ when two cans are combined to form a single sculpture.

Ida Ekblad’s energy seems to be inexhaustible. Her fast, exuberant work is almost too much for the public. She produces and works at great speed, her abstract paintings look as if they have been painted under pressure and with a great deal of creative urgency. Her sculptures, on the other hand, are fragile and precious. The young Norwegian collects the components for her in- stallation-based works from scrap yards, solders and hammers old metal into sculptures, writes poems and makes performances in collaboration with various other people. Ekblad unconcern- edly avoids being restricted to a particular genre or medium. Her art is at once expressive and restrained, subversive and tender. All in all it is a sensual experience, and Ekblad’s open, living and playful approach is apparent in every work. For the exhibition in Lucerne she has made numerous new works: as well as gouaches, a big painting on canvas and objects that she is as- sembling from material found here in Lucerne, she is also showing her video ‘In Exile from the Mineral Kingdom’ (2009) for the first time.

Using brush, spray and stencils, Christine Streuli creates universes of colour and ornaments. Her painting looks as if it has been made at an enormously fast pace, but is actually created over several stages, with extreme precision, a great deal of craft, skill and patience. She com- bines models and stylistic elements from all cultures into multi-layered and complicated paint- ings that are not confined to the canvas but often spill out onto the wall. Streuli’s artistic in- satiability characterises her work and turns it into a voyage of discovery both visually and in terms of its content. For the exhibition in Kunstmuseum Luzern she has created completely new works – very large picture formats that devote themselves seductively and expansively to the possibilities of painting, plumb its boundaries and make a point of stimulating, or overstimulat- ing, the viewer with their enthusiastic intensity. But the artist is also showing around 100 small- format paintings with stylistic brushstrokes which fill a single room.

The exhibition ‘Revolution’ brings together three artistic positions that have never before en- countered one another in this form. Loosely assembled, all three are individually given a great deal of space, and yet in the combination it becomes clear what energy, what artistic urge to create, what courage and what strength it takes to make ‘revolutionary’ art not in a political but in an atmospheric and sensual way, and thus to send viewers on a journey that cannot be sto- pped by collisions, explosions and upheaval.

Opening: friday 05.07., 6.30 p.m.

Kunstmuseum Luzern
Museum of Art Lucerne Europaplatz 1 (KKL Level K) - Luzern
Hours: Thursday to Sunday 10-18 Uhr
Wednesday 10am-8pm
1.08.2012 open from 10-18h

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