Henning Bohl
dal 25/3/2009 al 1/5/2009
Segnalato da
25/3/2009
Henning Bohl
Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York
Psyc Holo G yHe Ute. The artist presents a bold new body of work in an installation inspired by theatrical stage settings, street fairs, and subway platforms. The exhibition features large canvases resting on sheetrock tables or hinged to the walls of the gallery like staged partitions.
For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Henning Bohl will present a
bold new body of work in an installation inspired by theatrical stage
settings, street fairs, and subway platforms. The exhibition features large
canvases resting on sheetrock tables or hinged to the walls of the gallery
like staged partitions.
Henning Bohl continually questions the methods for producing and exhibiting
artworks. For Bohl, exhibition environments, including the way artworks are
made, installed, and displayed, become self-imposed situations that demand a
specific form of observation. He is interested in the idea of dramatizing
these pieces in different formal arrangements that are engaging and
performative. By uniquely dividing and creating different areas of space in
the gallery, Bohl navigates a path and outlines sceneries for the viewer.
The sceneries can create both a variety of plays for one setting or a
variety of settings for one play.
Bohl draws shapes with scissors and pastes them directly to the surface;
elements such as sickles, tears, and circles are formed from rolls of
colored window display paper and applied onto primed canvases. Sections are
left curling up into tubular rolls, enhancing air bubbles, wrinkles, and
ruptures that artificially evoke the clammy peeling of wallpaper posters in
a subway station or the lifting of the curtain shortly before a play. The
fragmented imagery alludes to Kabuki Theater faces seen in his earlier work,
but is now deconstructed and abstract, leaving still a physical semblance of
the vibrant caricatures.
Although his works still function as paintings, the artist has chosen to
present them as sculptural objects. Bohl alters the standards of
presentation by supporting the canvases with tables made from cornices
created for a previous exhibition. These architectural fragments consist of
serrated sheetrock haunches, presented upside down on pairs of wooden
trestles. While originally, Bohl hung canvases from these cornices, his new
works now rest on the cornice¹s fragments and are presented either as one
entity or as individual objects presented on a table. Letters are stenciled
across sections of these tables, words that are derived from the titles of
two popular German magazines "Theater Today" and "Psychology Today". Bohl
refers to their most literal sense: whereas theater is about creating a
fiction while psychology tries to destroy it. "The Ate R He Ute" and "Psyc
Holo G Yto Day," are interspersed throughout the gallery, sounding like a
series of stutters and appearing as concrete poetry. Split into syllables
they both complement and contradict each other, weaving their narrative with
the canvases and tying them into their own logic of semiotics and
succession.
Bohl¹s recent solo exhibitions include the Oldenburger Kunstverein,
Oldenburg, Germany and Galerie Johann König, Berlin, Germany. Bohl was also
included in the group exhibition, ³Egypted" (curated by Will Benedict) at
the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria. Bohl is currently preparing for
a solo exhibition opening June 30, 2009 at the Staatliche Kunsthalle
Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany and Pro Choice, Vienna, Austria (with
Sabine Reitmaier). The artist lives and works in Berlin.
opening march 26, 2009
Casey Kaplan Gallery
525 West 21st Street - New York
hours: tue-sat 10-6pm
Free admission