22/2/2002
Partnerships
NGBK, Berlin
This exhibition continues the series of Interrupted Careers. The exhibition series 'Partnerships' in three parts presents artists couples who have never occurred with common works. Each relationship and common artistic analysis took different courses. Their friendship was overshadowed by AIDS: one partner of each died in cause of the sickness of HIV. The third and last part of the series introduces the artists Matt. Ranger and Piotr Nathan. They got to know each other in June 1983 in Hamburg.
MATT. RANGER (1956 -1991) and PIOTR NATHAN
Third part of the series
This exhibition continues the series of Interrupted Careers
The exhibition series "Partnerships" in three parts presents artists couples who have never occurred with common works. Each relationship and common artistic analysis took different courses. Their friendship was overshadowed by AIDS: one partner of each died in cause of the sickness of HIV. The first part of the series at the NGBK presented works from Ull Hohn and Tom Burr and the second part focussed on Jochen Klein and Wolfgang Tillmans.
The third and last part of the series introduces the artists Matt. Ranger (1956 - 1991) and Piotr Nathan (*1956). They got to know each other in June 1983 in Hamburg. Matt. Ranger from New York was invited to participate at an exhibition of the group "Stille Helden/ Neesha" founded by Ute Meta Bauer and Susanne Homann in which Piotr Nathan was also taking part. Ranger then moved to Hamburg in the same year. In 1986 Piotr Nathan moved to Berlin where Matt. Ranger followed him in 1987. In September 1991 Matt. Ranger died in cause of the sickness of Aids.
After his boy-friend moved away from Hamburg in 1986, Matt. Ranger returned working with installations and three-dimensional works. From then he reconsidered painting as his genuine working method. In the exhibition we present 26 of his paintings which were done after 1986. Like Ulmann Hakert also describes in the catalogue, Matt. Rangers "Kreuzstichbilder", wich look like embroidery patterns on a tambour, seem to visualize passing time. Time which is passing without the otherone, in which the consciousness about the nearcoming death is manifested.
Matt. Ranger finds his artistic stimulations in newspapers, magazines, illustrated art history books brochures and instructions: the whole stock of the Pop Art since Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton. He reflects the image, it`s original and realisation, the whole process of the illusional painting of the present.
The aparent chaotic, just found and careless chosen materials are taken into a certain structure. American symbols seem to be typical for his painting: bodybuilders, Marilyn Monroe, filmstills from Hollywood movies. He confronts these pictural themes with an artistic structure. In the late works appear so called "Polka-Dots", which make the painting look like being full of holes or look like "Sandwich Prints". There are two levels which overlap: the figurative painting with abstract-geometric patterns.
Piotr Nathan, born in 1956 in Gdansk and living now in Berlin, uses next to the traditional painting many different forms of expressions. Characteristical for his work is a complex process of translation from one media into another. Painting itself is thereby just part of a wider context.
Piotr Nathan uses the principles of turning, transforming, painting over and enlarging. He takes, e.g., imprints of bullet holes from a house front and puts them into a constellation which remarks the surrounding of a stain of urine from a dying friend.Sickness, death, Aids and it`s stigmatism is the context in which also "Ein erstarrter Salto" was done. It is made of 37 sheets and hints to bed-wetting, education and the longing for the warmth of embryo. It rises questions about the manipulated development of society for the individual and identity.
The exhibition presents Piotr Nathans huge installation "Ein erstarrter Salto", (1993), which was done for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, "Snowflakes", (1987/88), and a slide projection with photographs from the series "Der verwunschene Garten", (1992/ 2000). Specially for this exhibition, Piotr Nathan draws up a temporary mural painting which is stimulated by a study of Matt. Ranger.
The subject Aids in both of their works is always connected to the real threat.
Opening hours: daily 12 am to 6.30 pm. Free entrance.
A catalogue to the three exhibtions, about 120 pages with many illustrations will be published in January with essays written by Ulmann-Matthias Hakert, Manfred Hermes, Susanne A. Hofmann, Jutta Koether, Stefanie Kreuzer, Kassandra Nakas, Torsten Neuendorff and Frank Wagner.
The series "Interrupted Careers" already presented three exhibitions:
In 1997 "Mark Morrisroe 1959 - 1989", in 1999 "Immediate Past/ Interrupted Careers. Christian Borngräber, Manfred Salzgeber, Wolfgang Max Faust - Three Cultural Agents in the eightees" and in 2000 "Hannah Wilke 1949 - 1993"
Image: Left side is Matt. Ranger, Sugar Ray, 1998 and right side Piotr Nathan, Ein erstarrter Salto ( A stiffened somersault), 1993.
NGBK,
Oranienstr. 25, 10999 Berlin.
Tel.:030/ 6153031