Lukas Maximilian Huller
dal 12/2/2009 al 29/3/2009
Segnalato da
12/2/2009
Lukas Maximilian Huller
Caprice Horn Gallery, Berlin
Using as his reference points, ideas of excess, decadence and decline that are as old as western culture itself, the artist draws a strikingly accurate picture of the way we live now. Taking his starting point from the representational tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, Huller stages large-scale performances in tableaux which he then photographs with a panoramic camera.
“Using as his reference points, ideas of excess, decadence and decline that are as old as western culture itself, Lukas Maximilian Hüller draws a strikingly accurate picture of the way we live now. Taking his starting point from the representational tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, Hüller stages large-scale performances in tableaux which he then photographs with a panoramic camera. What we see whether, in the violence meted out to the innocent (and perhaps not so innocent) in Wrath, or in the conjoined sexual and gastronomic bacchanal of Gluttony,” […] “is a symbolic depiction of our world.” […] “Hüller demonstrates the capacity of the photograph for allegory; we know that these events are staged, but at the same time we understand their reality, elsewhere undocumented. In doing this he has much in common with an indexical literalness of the photographic sign. (I am thinking of artists as varied as Sarah Jones, Sam Taylor Wood, Jeff Wall – both of whom have a similar fascination with the large scale tableaux – and Charlie White). We might say that one of the defining features of post-modern art has been the displacement of what were, within modernism, often thought of as purely indexical, documentary media (photography, film and later video) to become the principal allegorical forms of our time (even if the media of modernity were deployed in the service of allegory by modernists – in surrealist film for example – such practices w ere generally subordinated to modernism use of obsolescent media as the appropriate vehicles for a critique of modernity).
Hüller is post-modern in another way too: that of self conscious citation. Hüller invokes Hieronymus Bosch as a starting point for his series. Bosch used the Seven Deadly Sins as both moral allegory for religious instruction and as a narrative structure – “the painting in the form of a wheel” that Hüller mimes with his use of the panorama. This story – telling property is important to the artist, but so too is the iconographic resource that Bosch in particular and the western tradition of “morality painting” in general, provides. If Gluttony, on the one hand, reminds us of those critiques of excess that run through the quiet condemnation of still-lives, where Franz Hals might be understood as a ‘noisy’ painter, to 1970s f ilms like The Decameron, then Wrath draws as much on Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell as it does Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la Guerreand, of course, Goya’s Disasters of War.”
(Chris Townsend about Lukas Maximilian Huellers “Seven Deadly Sins”) [PDF]
“Hüller’s sins are far from venial-any corrupt Catholic priest confessor would be titillated to note that these sins concern ‘grave matters’, they are committed with ‘full knowledge’ and in ‘deliberate and complete consent’. While the spheres of Hell and Heaven in the Divine Comedy are neatly cordoned off from each other, for Hüller as for Pasolini, they twist and swirl back together in a series of dramas that luxuriate in a Purgatory of delightful and appalling physical sensation. The garden of earthly delights, the Fall and earthly paradise are all rolled into one. At the centre of Hieronymus Bosch’s mandala-like Seven Sins there is a circular medallion that is said to represent the blue-eyed iris of God. Within it, a naked man is depicted rising from the ground. He could be the resurrected Christ or simply a reflection of our own human self viewed in the Eye of Man. Dante gazed into the face of God and saw an intense pool of light, like a stella supernova, surrounded by swirling rings of winged celestial beings. We gaze inward into the Eye of Man and reflect back to feed our greedy paraphilic gaze, we see our own writhing, tumbling selves, far from perfect, loaded, well hung with snow-white tans.
If Hueller pays homage to Bosch and the Northern Renaissance he pays it via his homage to the 20th century and to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in their inexorable voyage towards rebirth in an imagined New World. The final work of the troubled Brecht-Weill collaboration was The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie, a ‘ballet chanté’ in which the central figure, Anna, ranges across the USA seeking to regain her fortune and her home. In this new morality play the only wrong that Anna commits is not to embrace each sinful act as she encounters it on her way. Written before either Weill or Brecht had set foot in America, the city names forma litany of redemption from morality in the New World: Memphis (pride), Los Angeles (anger), Philadelphia (gluttony), Boston (lust), Tennessee (greed) and San Francisco (envy).”
opening febr. 13, 2009
Caprice Horn Gallery
Kochstr. 60 - Berlin
Free admission