calendario eventi  :: 

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1/5/2014

Two exhibitions

Johann Konig, Berlin

Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Coming II

Johann König, Berlin
3 - 24 May 2014

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend, Johann König, Berlin, is pleased to present Coming II, Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ first exhibition at the gallery with a body of new works, including sculptures, paintings and papier mâchés.

In Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ work, drawings tend towards sculpture, sculptures tend toward furniture, and paintings hover on the borders of materialization. They describe a precarious state of instability and portray their own working process in almost literal terms as expansive, absorptive and self-generating. The works are characterized by a seemingly automatic tendency to attract whatever happens to be around them – items of the artist’s or her family’s clothing, kitchen crockery, pieces of furniture, or words that happen to be on her mind. Though the various relics appear to have been arrived at through casual means, there is nonetheless an intrinsic value in the old t-shirt or coffee mug that make their way into one of her sculptures. Suggesting undisclosed memories and associations, they bring us closer to a cumulative existence construed from the repetitive tasks and the minor rituals of the everyday. The collisions of found domestic objects with self-made, expressively moulded ceramics describe experience at the level of the tactile and a responsive rather than systematic working method. The works become diaristic in their incidental observations about how we move amongst our belongings, and small-scale reactions to the effects of time passing and the clutter that accumulates around a life.

The tables and chairs in Hutchins’ work exist somewhere between domestic fragment and pedestal. “I often think of pedestals as prepositions: and, but, or, for,” Hutchins has said. “So even when I am using a table as a pedestal, it becomes part of a prepositional phrase for positioning something, but it also has its power as a noun.” This goes some way to explain the fertile duality in Hutchins’ works whereby the objects employed retain their blunt materiality (each sofa, table or arm chair remains very much itself, despite the damage inflicted on it), but they also invite a less specific, more associative reading generated by the prepositional nature the artist describes. Despite the artist’s embrace of what she calls “the simple factness of things”, it is in the precarious and instable relation between elements – joined together by an ‘and, but, or, for’ – that meaning transpires.

Hutchins describes the new works made for this exhibition in terms of another grammatical figure, the gerund, whereby a verb is transformed to become a noun. The notion of an activity becoming an object describes the artist’s explicit embrace of process and accident, as well as the particular appeal of ceramics as a medium in which fairy-tale like miniature landscapes or grottoes may be conjured, as if momentarily, from intricate masses of clay.

Text: Kirsty Bell

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 Chicago) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Solo exhibitions of her work were held at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2013), Centre PasquArt Biel, Switzerland (2013), ICA Boston (2011), Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2011), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2010). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions: Living in the material world at the Museum Haus Esters and Haus Lange, in Krefeld, Germany (running until early August), The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Paper, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013), A Terrible Beauty is Born, 11th Lyon Biennial (2011), Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2010).

Hutchins’ work is in public and private collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Michael Sailstorfer
Antiherbst

Johann König at ST. AGNES
3 - 7 May 2014

Johann König, Berlin is delighted to present over the forthcoming Gallery Weekend Michael Sailstorfer’s Antiherbst [Anti-Autumn] — the fourth exhibition to be staged in the former ST. AGNES Church. The gallery-goer is here confronted with an extraordinary scenic spectacle: from a screen ostensibly hovering in the dark room-space a lone-standing, fully-grown tree shines forth resplendently. It is magnificent to behold, well-formed in its silhouette, the epitome of thriving Nature, changing its shape only imperceptibly, evidently under the influence of varying weather conditions. The rustling of its foliage fills the air.

For the primary space in ST. AGNES with its monumental simplicity Sailstorfer has chosen a large-format projection surface hung immediately in front of the former altar-area in the central nave, so that the beholder can walk up to the tree, his steps seeking as it were a dialogic rhythm matching the tree’s movements. The origin of the work is Sailstorfer’s public Antiherbst project, realized in the Emscherkunst.2013 exhibition on the Rhine dyke near Duisburg. In a laborious and painstaking process, Sailstorfer and his team set to work on the tree over several weeks: as, during the autumn, the tree shed the first of its leaves, these were conserved, dyed green and re-attached to the tree with thin cable ties. This long-term performance was documented on film and post-edited so as to eliminate those sequences in which the ongoing work-processes were visible. In the final result, one sees – in Sailstorfer’s words – “only the image of the tree, whose leaves change, move and seem ever more unreal and artificial, but, in contrast to the trees in the background, do not fall to the ground”.

With Antiherbst Sailstorfer has achieved a further Sisyphan labour, which, at first glance, appears completely meaningless as a process, as a performance so to say, but then becomes all the more meaningful in its filmic, aesthetic documentation. Sailstorfer, it seems, is forever in search of the subtle in the banal, of the non-humdrum in the humdrum.

In the former Lady Chapel, Sailstorfer is exhibiting, for the first time in Germany, one of his latest works. Reibungsverlust am Arbeitsplatz [Friction Losses at the Work-Place] (2014) is a water-driven mill-wheel installed on a trailer, the mill-wheel’s rotations setting a car-tyre turning. Continually driven forwards and yet compelled to stay in the same spot, the tyre is forever wearing down its rubber coating on the floor. The huge input of energy, visibly bodied forth in the space-dominating mill-wheel, has no creative effect but, as it were, visibly destroys and loses itself in nothingness. It is, one supposes, the tyre’s fate that the mill which drives it on is the mill against which it fights in vain – an image that is not without its comedy but that nevertheless gives food for thought, applicable as it is to many situations in our own lives.

Michael Sailstorfer (b. 1979 Velden/Vils) lives and works in Berlin. He studied under Olaf Metzel at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and at Goldsmiths College in London. His works are currently on display in his solo exhibition Every piece is a new problem in the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio and can be seen, from October 2014 on, in the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota. In Germany, Sailstorfer is this year opening solo presentations in the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin and in the Museum Kurhaus Kleve. Sailstorfer’s works form part of important museum collections such as the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, the Centre Pompidou Foundation, Paris, the Städelmuseum, Frankfurt-on-Main or the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Opening: 2 May 2014, 6 – 9 pm

Johann König, Berlin
Dessauer Str. 6-7 - 10963 Berlin
Tue - Sat, 10am - 6pm

ST. AGNES
Alexandrinenstr. 118-121 - 10969 Berlin
open daily 11am - 6pm

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